BJP Vis A Vis Hindu Resurgence

BJP vis-a-vis Hindu

Koenraad Elst

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VOICE OF INDIA

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Table of Contents

Introduction by Koenraad Elst

1 . Anything but a Hindu Party

2. Equal Respect for all Religions

3. What is wrong with Hindu

4. The BJP Flag

5. How the Rama Card was Thrown Away

6. Sangh Parivar, The Last Gandhians

7. Gandhian Non-Violence

8. The Sangh’s Anti-Intellectualism

9. The Sangh as Dinasaur

10. Anti-Intellectualism in Action
1 1 . 1 am a Hindu Communalist

12. Vulgar Nationalism

13. Hindu and Other Peoples’ Nationalism

14. The Sangh’s Muslims

15. Party of Shopkeepers

16. Things to do for the BJP

17. Christ in India

18. Hindus Wielding The Sword of Islam

19. How Not to Deal with Islam

20. How to Deal with Islam

21. Know the Truth, and the Truth Shall Make You Free

22. Hindu Objections

23. Conclusion

Appendix I: A Reply to Kanchan Gupta

Introduction

Many people inside or close to the BJP, and inside or close to the broader Sangh Parivar, have
become dissatisfied with what they perceive as the increasing distance between the BJP's actual
policies and the Hindu expectations among the public on which the party capitalizes. To some
extent, the problem lies with the BJP itself, distinguishing it from other Hindutva organizations,
who then tend to blame the increasing non-Sangh element inside the BJP for this "degeneration",
especially the opportunists who jumped onto the promising BJP bandwagon after the 1989 and
1991 electoral breakthroughs. To a large extent, however, the BJP problem is the RSS problem. In
the BJP, the RSS approach is put to the test of day-to-day political practice, in confrontation with
the enemies of Hindutva, without the benefit of the secretiveness which characterizes the
functioning of other Sangh-affiliated organizations. Except for the recent defection and cormption
scandals, the major failures of the BJP can be traced to RSS policies and RSS ideological
conditioning.

At any rate, the problem is serious enough, even in the eyes of many BJP or RSS members, to
warrant a frank debate. It is to this debate that the present paper wants to contribute. The prime
focus of our attention will be the BJP's performance, but with constant reference to the RSS
background. Most examples will be drawn from the one aspect of Hindutva politics which is by far
the most conspicuous and the most common target of secularist criticism: the relation with Islam.
Historically, the RSS was created in a context of Hindu-Muslim tension, and till today, its activists
have frequently been in conflict with the Muslim community politically or even physically. An
organization which has had to deal with India's Islam problem for more than 70 years may be
expected to have developed a clear analysis of this problem, and an effective strategy to counter it.

Many Sangh Parivar activists are not going to like this paper. They have a childlike affection for the
organization which has given them togetherness and solidarity, a feeling of purpose and of home.
Often self-effacing idealists, they don't mind criticism of their own person, and they can listen to
insults to India and Hinduism without being moved, but they are very touchy when it comes to
criticism of the Sangh. I apologize to them for any hurt caused by this text, but I am convinced of
its urgent necessity. The Sangh is benumbed by the decades-long crossfire of criticism by its
enemies, but is not used to listen to criticism from friendly quarters.

On the other hand, a lot of Sangh people are going to agree with my remarks. It is pardy because of
complaints from Sangh activists themselves that I have resolved to formulate this critique. Littie
does the Sangh leadership realize that numerous idealistic volunteers have joined one of the many
Sangh-affiliated organizations because they want to do something for Hinduism, not because they
care about the specific Sangh outlook. The Sangh Parivar just happens to be around, just happens
to be the largest organization reputed to be working for Hinduism, so Hindu-minded people join
one of its fronts rather than go through the wasteful trouble of setting up their own rivalling shop;
but that doesn't mean they are enthusiastic about certain Sangh fads which will come up for scrutiny
in this paper.

The present text is a much-enlarged version of a two-part guest column published in the Observer
of Business and Politics (Delhi) of 6 and 7 December 1996, and contributed at the suggestion of
Mr. R.K. Mishra and Mr. Balbir Poonj. I thank them for their interest and for the courage of
publishing that column, but of course they bear no responsibility whatsoever for its contents.
Among all the Sangh people whom I should thank for giving me access to information, I want to
mention Mr. K.R. Malkani and Mr. Devendra Swarup in particular. I hope they can appreciate the
spirit in which I offer the comments which follow.

Koenraad Elst
Leuven, 17 January 1997

1. Anything but a ’’Hindu” party

The strange thing about the BJP is that its voters consider it a Hindu party, its enemies denounce it
as a Hindu party, but the party will call itself anything except a Hindu party.

Unlike most critics of the BJP, who tend to make their point by quoting sources openly hostile to
the party, we should prove our case by going to its own formulations of its ideology. To summarize
the ideological positions of the BJP and its former avatar, the BJS (Bharatiya Jana Sangh), from
authentic sources, we will reproduce the brief professions of ideological commitment given in the
Constitutions of the BJS (1973) and of the BJP (1992). The summary given in the BJS Constitution
under the heading "Aims and Objectives in Brief', a programme to which all BJS party members
pledged their loyalty, are as follows (we give it in its entirety, but change the order so as to group the
different points under headings of our own making):

1) Cultural nationalism: "Political, social and economic reconstruction of the country on the basis of
Bharatiya Sanskriti [= culture] and Maryada [= "limit", ethics]. Protection and promotion of the
cow. Use of Hindi and other Pradeshic [= provincial] languages as official languages in their
regions. Changes in the judicial system to suit the genius of India and fit in with present-day
conditions."

2) Political nationalism: "The establishment of a unitary government and decentralisation of political
and economic power. Establishment of Akhand Bharat [= undivided India including the Pakistani
and Bangladeshi territories]. Complete integration of Kashmir. Liberation of territory occupied by
China and Pakistan. A foreign policy based upon enlightened self-interests of the country. Modern-
most military armaments."

3) Social concerns: "Protection of the fundamental rights of the individual and the promotion of
interests of the Society. Guarantee of the fundamental right to work and livelihood. Upholding
establishment and protection of the tiller's right to ownership of land. Ceiling on agricultural land
and redistribution of land. Eradication of untouchability. Elimination of corruption. Free education
up to middle class. Facilities for medical care and social security."

4) Economic programme: "Encouragement to small mechanised and rural industries.

Nationalisation of basic industries. Curbing monopolistic tendencies in the economic sphere.
Determination of minimum and maximum expendable income. Worker's participation in the profit
and management of the industries. Stabilisation of prices. [1]

Under headings 1 and 2 we certainly find a nationalist programme, considerably more radical than
anything stated by the later BJP. Under headings 3 and 4, we do not find the "rightist" policies
which the leftists always attribute to the Hindutva forces, but a typical social-democratic
programme. But either way, what we do not find, is an explicidy Hindu orientation underlying this

programme. One may argue that in its practical application, Hindu social philosophy boils down to
an "integral humanism" of which this programme is the logical explicitation; but even then, there
should be no reason to be so modest (not to say secretive) about the Hindu source of this
orientation.

The BJP defines its ideology as follows:

"Article II: Objective. The party is pledged to build up India as a strong and prosperous nation,
which is modern, progressive and enlightened in oudook and which proudly draws inspiration from
India's ancient culture and values and thus is able to emerge as great world power playing an
effective role in the comity of Nations for the establishment of world peace and a just international
order.

"The party aims at establishing a democratic state which guarantees to all citizens irrespective of
caste, creed or sex, political, social and economic justice, equality of opportunity and liberty of faith
and expression.

"The party shall bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of India as by law established and
to the principles of socialism, secularism and democracy and would uphold the sovereignty, unity
and integrity of India.

"Article III: Basic Philosophy. Integral Humanism shall be the basic philosophy of the Party.

"Article IV: Commitments. The Party shall be committed to nationalism and national integration,
democracy, Gandhian Socialism, Positive Secularism, that is 'Sarva Dharma Samabhav', and value-
based politics. The party stands for decentralisation of economic and political power." [2]

Upon joining the party, every BJP member makes the following pledge:

"I believe in Integral Humanism which is the basic philosophy of Bharatiya Janata Party.

"I am committed to Nationalism and National Integration, Democracy, Gandhian Socialism,
Positive Secularism (Sarva Dharma Samabhava) and value -based politics.

"I subscribe to the concept of a Secular State and Nation not based on religion.

"I firmly believe that this task can be achieved by peaceful means alone.

"I do not observe or recognize untouchability in any shape or form.

"I am not a member of any other political party.

"I undertake to abide by the Constitution, Rules and Discipline of the Party." [3]

I have taken the trouble of quoting the BJP's explicit statement of its political objectives and
methods in full, because these official self-declarations and the received wisdom about the BJP are
miles apart. These statements can be used as counter-evidence by those who are concerned about
the slanderous descriptions of the BJP as "Hindu fundamentalists" standing for "preservation of
caste oppression", for a "theocratic state", for "communal violence", if not for "fascism". However,
while comforting for those who try to prove that the BJP is a nice secularist party, the cited official
statements of the BJP party-line are somewhat worrying from a Hindu viewpoint. Indeed, the word
"Hindu" does not figure in them at any point.

Moreover, like in the Indian Constitution, there is nothing typically Hindu about these BJS/BJP
programmes. The BJS text still contained some Sanskrit words which could have been replaced with
English terms without loss of meaning, but the operative term is Bharatiya, "Indian"; the BJP can
do without the Sanskrit altogether (except for one problematic expression, cfr. infra). These
manifestoes are entirely in the tradition of Western liberal-democratic nationalism, and most of the
expressions used can be found in texts of the American and French Revolutions or the speeches of
19th-century liberal nationalists like Lajos Kossuth or Giuseppe Mazzini. Not that this is
objectionable in itself, but from a party claiming "Bharatiya culture" as its inspiration, this wholesale
borrowing from the West is not very promising.

The term integral humanism, the BJP's official ideology, was introduced in Sangh ideology by
Deendayal Upadhyaya, as a social doctrine based on Hindu instead of Western thought. It was
given a universalist rather than a "national" name, which in principle I consider a good thing;
"Western" ideologies like liberalism and socialism have not been labelled after their country of
origin either. At the same time, a nagging suspicion remains that the term was chosen and
promoted as yet another attempt to acquire a "secular" identity.

[1] Reproduced in Bharatiya Jana Sangh Party Documents 1951-1972, vol.l, p.222.

[2] Constitution and Rules (as amended by the National Council at Gandhinagar, Gujarat, on 2nd
May 1992) of the Bharatiya Janata Party, p.3-4. "Sarva-Dharma-Samabhava" is a Gandhian slogan
meaning "equal respect for all religions".

[3] Constitution and Rules, p.19.

2. ’’Equal respect for all religions”

The only explicitly Indian contribution in the cited BJS/BJP self-declarations is of doubtful value:
"positive secularism" defined as "sarva-dharma-samabhava", "equal respect for all religions". We let
the difference with the original European concept of secularism (equal indifference towards all
religions, equal independence from all religions) pass, and focus on the problematic meaning of the
slogan defining this "positive secularism". Two meanings are attested: the political meaning
apparendy given to it in the cited BJP texts, viz. that the state must be equidistant from Hinduism,
Islam, Christianity and any other religion; and the religious meaning given to it by Mahatma Gandhi
and his followers, viz. that a religious person should have equal respect for Hinduism, Islam etc.,
because all these religions are equally good and satisfying.

The Gandhians and the travelling neo-Hindu sadhus have spread the notion that Hinduism itself
holds all religions in equal esteem, even that it considers all religions to be equally tme. This claim is
repeated with enthusiasm in anti-Hindutva polemic by secularists who try to delegitimize Hindu
self-defence in the name of some suicidal masochism advertised as "genuine Hinduism". However,
the truth is that this Gandhian slogan is a typical product of the political tangles of the colonial age
and of syncretistic Theosophy-influenced neo-Hinduism; it is not an ancient Hindu dictum
capturing the true spirit of Hinduism. Possibly Gandhi meant the slogan to be a trick to domesticate
Christianity and Islam into the age-old system of Hindu pluralism: if Hindus treat Islam and
Christianity as "equal" to their own cherished traditions, Muslims and Christians will reciprocate
this rhetoric and give up their open intention to replace Hinduism with their own beliefs. The
results of Gandhi's policies, viz. Partition and an intensification of Christian missionary subversion,
already indicates how wrong-headed the well-intended slogan really is.

Of course, Hindu tradition has always been wholeheartedly pluralistic. It cherishes a principle of
modesty in judgment, aware of the limitations of each human viewpoint. It respects the urge to seek
the truth which alights in every soul. It recognizes its own attitude when it sees a reverence for the
sacred at work in other societies. It has compassion for the limitations of the human intellect, which
in most people never outgrows the conditioning of education and culture (how many people who
deride a given doctrine or practice would have arrived at the same judgment if they had been born
in a community upholding this doctrine or practice?). For this reason, Hinduism practises tolerance
vis-a-vis all religious doctrines and practices, even obviously wrong ones, as long as they don't
interfere with those of others. History shows that Hinduism practises equal tolerance towards all
sects of Hindu provenance, and towards Zoroastrianism, Judaism and pre-colonial Syrian-
Christianity which, at least in India, have always abided by the rules of Hindu pluralism: live and let
live. This tolerance becomes questionable and indicative of a lack of viveka/ discrimination when
one is dealing with religions which refuse to abide by the mles.

Hinduism applauds diversity and consequently accepts that people of different temperaments,
circumstances and levels of understanding develop different viewpoints and different forms to
express even the same viewpoint. In that sense, it has always paid equal respect to shramanas and

brahmanas, to jnana and bhakti, etc. It showed samabhava to all traditions which counted as
dharma. This respect was never due to adharma practices and doctrines such as Christianity and
Islam, the religions for whose benefit the slogan is used mostly.

The fundamental mistake of Indian secularism is that Hinduism is put in the same category as Islam
and Christianity. The definition of "religion" which is implied when we call Islam and Christianity
religions, may well not apply to Hinduism, and vice versa. Islam and Christianity are defined, by
believers as well as by informed outsiders, as belief systems; Hinduism is not so defined (except by
incompetent outsiders and some of their neo-Hindu imitators who try to cast Hinduism into the
mould of Christianity). Islam's and Christianity's intrinsic irrationality and hostility to independent
critical thought warranted secularism as a kind of containment policy. By contrast, Hinduism
recognizes freedom of thought and does not need to be contained by secularism. The contents of
this last sentence, meaning the radical difference in kind of Hinduism and its enemies, can be found
in many Hindutva publications (e.g., lamely, "Hinduism is not a religion but a way of life", or
apologetically, "Hindus cannot be fundamentalists"), and yet the same Hindutva spokesmen parrot
a Gandhian slogan which treats both Hinduism and its enemies as equal members of the set of
"religions" or "dharmas".

Historically, Hindus have quickly recognized Islam and missionary Christianity as mleccha, barbaric
predatory religions, not as instances of dharma to which any (not to speak of "equal") respect is
due. Until Swami Dayananda Saraswati, they didn't even consider these religions as worthy of a
detailed critique. Once this critique was finally made, it was quickly proven that Christianity and
Islam are not "equally true" with Hinduism, whether with the help of modern rationalist scholarship
or from the viewpoint of Hindu spirituality (cfr. infra).

Far from paying equal respect to just any movement whether dharmic or not, Hinduism does not
even require equal respect for each of its genuine dharmas. Toleration does not imply equal respect
for the insights and values taught by the sects concerned; it is an application of the true ahimsa
spirit, viz. accepting the right of existing entities including ethnic identities and religious traditions
to continue their existence. But this doesn't mean that Hinduism considers all doctrines and
practices as of equal value. Hinduism as a whole gives a place in the sun to all, but it does not want
any individual to set aside his criticisms of certain viewpoints or his personal preferences for some
and aversion for other religious practices. It never was anti-logical nor anti-realistic; therefore, it
never required people to muzzle both their rational faculty and their temperamental inclinations.
These criticisms and preferences are perfecdy normal, and there is no need to suppress them with
an enforced "equal respect". Even within the Hindu fold, there is no question of equality between
different traditions and viewpoints.

One Hindu philosopher may disagree with another, i.e. consider his own view right and the other's
wrong; indeed, debates between different schools of Hindu thought have mostly taken the logically
necessary form of demonstrating the truth of one and the consequent untruth of the opposing
viewpoint. Calling one view true and another untrue is not what I would call equal respect, even
though there may be equal respect for the human beings defending the respective views. Like a
good moderator in a public debate, Hinduism allows both sides their say, but it is not required to

believe that both are equally right. Similarly, though Hindu society has both a class of married
priests and a class of celibate renunciates, there have always been people upholding the one
institution and arguing against the other, e.g. that full-time monkhood is a parasitic way of life, or
conversely, that the great spiritual achievement happens to require full-time dedication and thereby
excludes social and family duties. Hindu tradition as such refuses to be pinned down to one side of
the argument, but every Hindu is entided to choose sides and prefer one dharma over another.

Apart from this subjective inequality of dharmas which Hinduism allows its adherents, there are
universal judgments on which the whole society has developed a broad consensus, and which label
one practice as right and another as wrong, or at least as inferior. Thus, a contemporary ritualist
who sacrifices flowers and fruits condemns the animal sacrifice practised by his forebears, and still
by some shaktic sects, as primitive and unnecessarily cruel. There was a time when Yedic seers
practised animal sacrifice, and though Hindus still hold the Yedic seers in great esteem, the Hindu
mainstream has outgrown this bloody practice: there is no equal respect for the old, primitive
practice and for the new, more enlightened practice (as is illustrated by the clumsy attempts to
prove that the descriptions of Yedic seers sacrificing goats or eating beef, or of the Buddha eating
pork, are mere metaphors). The Vedic seers were Hindus alright, the shaktic priests and sorcerers
are Hindus alright, their rituals are part of Sanatana Dharma alright, yet their slaughterhouse dharma
is not considered worthy of equal respect with more refined innovations in ritual.

Similarly, even most meat-eating Hindus agree that vegetarianism is superior, deserving of greater
respect. Another pan-Hindu consensus pertinent to the present discussion is the rejection of the
narrow-minded exclusivist sects which refuse to abide by the rules of pluralism. Before the Hindu
mind got confused with sarva-dharma-samabhava, this meant a spontaneous abhorrence of the
destructive fanaticism of Christianity and Islam.

Within broad limits, the Hindu tradition as a whole does not pronounce on the existing differences,
leaving it to the Hindu people to make a choice between its own variety of options. Given each
individual man's limitations, it is wise not to identify with one man's beliefs and preferences (as
Islam does) and give room to different and even opposing positions. All the same, Sanatana
Dharma leaves its adherents entirely free to prefer one option over another, and even to criticize
and reject certain options. So, even within the spectrum of Hindu schools and sects, there is no
question of sarva-dharma-samabhava, merely of peaceful co-existence. The few cases of violent
rioting between Shaiva and Vaishnava monks (gleefully played up and magnified in malafide pieces
on "the myth of Hindu tolerance") may be considered as trespasses against the spirit of Hinduism,
but debates and denunciations of certain views and practices remain entirely within the rules of
Hindu pluralism.

Moreover, the same rational objection against sarva-dharma-samabhava which applies to intra-
Hindu debates, applies to the relation between Islam or Christianity and Hinduism, or even to that
between Islam and Christianity. According to Christianity, Jesus was the divine Saviour and
Mohammed was nobody; according to Islam, Jesus was just a human prophet and Mohammed was
the final prophet. These doctrines are mutually exclusive and cannot both be right. They can be
equally wrong (actually, they are) and hence deserving of equal scepticism, but it is impossible for

both to be right and deserving of equal respect.

The slogan sarva-dharma-samabhava (not to mention the plain buffoonery of the "equal tmth of all
religions" propagated by Bhagwan Das and the latter-day Ramakrishna Mission) is a cheap but all
too transparent way of solving doctrinal contradictions, viz. by dogmatically decreeing that they are
non-existent or at least irrelevant.fi] It is incredibly pretentious, firstly by falsely implying that one
knows all religions (how can you pronounce on things which you don't know?), and secondly by
overruling the laws of logic, viz. by positing the equivalence of mutually contradictory doctrines. In
practice, it also implies a refusal to hear the representatives of the religions concerned, esp. when
they explain why rival doctrines (including the whole spectrum of Hinduism) are unacceptable to
them. Finally, while the slogan is rather harmless when applied to rival schools of Hinduism, it
becomes very dangerous when (as mosdy) it is applied to viper religions with an explicit programme
of annihilating Hinduism. Hindu activists should think again about this slogan, then drop it.

Instead, however, they have decided to make things worse: the RSS-affiliated trade-union, Bharatiya
Mazdoor Sangh, has taken the initiative of founding a Sarva Panth Samadar Manch (Equal Respect
for All Sects Front), on 16 April 1994. The function where this new platform was created, was
presided over by Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, who counts as the Sangh's model Muslim (cfr. infra).
The problem is not that contact is made with Muslims. Muslims are as good human beings as
Hindus on average, and every effort should be made to break through the intrinsic separatism of
Islam, which teaches its followers that there are two separate mankinds: the Muslims to whom both
bliss in heaven and rulership on earth have been promised, and the unbelievers, doomed to
subservience in this world and eternal hellfire in the next. Indeed, one of the wellsprings of the RSS
desire to reach out to the Muslims was the experience of cordial co-operation with Jamaat-e-Islami
activists during the Emergency, as BMS founder-president Dattopant Thengadi told me. Soon after
coming out of jail in 1977, K. R. Malkani told Sita Ram Goel that he had an opportunity to learn
true Islam from the Jamaat-i-Islami co-prisoners. When Goel asked him as to how he could judge
the statements of these spokesmen for Islam when he himself had not studied the subject, Malkani
dismissed the doubt raised with a disdainful smile.

The problem is that these outreach operations invariably imply flattery of Islam. The day a unit of
any Sangh Parivar organization includes even a single Muslim, its capacity to talk freely about Islam
disappears. Instead of freeing the Muslims from their medieval doctrinal conditioning called Islam,
this approach only serves to confirm them in their thralldom to Mohammed and his belief system.
Bringing the alienated Muslims into the national mainstream without loosening their ties to
Mohammed was Mahatma Gandhi's full-time occupation, yet he failed dismally. There is no sign at
all that the RSS has a better and more clever approach which could spare it the same humiliating
defeat at the hands of unregenerate Islamic separatism.

A must reading about this is Harsh Narain: Myth of Composite Culture and Equality of Religions,
Voice of India 1991.

3. What is Wrong with "Hindu"?

To an extent, the avoidance of the term "Hindu" has characterized many earlier avatars of Hindu
nationalism. Sri Aurobindo tided his newspaper "Arya", and declared that India would rise with
"Sanatana Dharma", a more profound term than the colloquial "Hinduism". The Arya Samaj
preferred the term "Vedic", or the Vedic term "Arya" (denoting adherence to Vedic civilizational
standards), to the originally purely geographical Persian term "Hindu". Moreover, "Hindu" was a
catch-all term which included traditions considered deviant or non-Vedic by the Arya Samaj (esp.
Puranic, Tantric); in the 1881 census, the Arya Samaj even advised its members to register as non-
Hindus. This policy was reversed for the 1901 census, but in the 1980s, some Arya Samaj factions
again made attempts to be recognized as a non-Hindu minority. By then, the term "Hindu" had not
only become a distinctly dirty word, but also carried constitutional disadvantages with it (cfr. infra).
In the same period, and for the same conformist and opportunist reasons, the Ramakrishna Mission
unsuccessfully tried to get registered as a new non-Hindu religion called Ramakrishnaism.

Even those who espouse doctrines and practices which are described in handbooks on "Hinduism",
avoid the term "Hindu". In recent years, yoga teachers whether Indian or Western have tended to
avoid mentioning the purely "Hindu" character of what they offer as the universal "science of yoga"
(it is Christian fundamentalists who warn people of the Satanic Hindu character of these seemingly
innocuous breathing and mental exercises). The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi calls his sadhana "science
of creative intelligence", the political party which his followers in the West founded is called
"Natural Law Party", and its viewpoints are typically prefixed with "Vedic": Vedic economics, Vedic
health programme, etc. One of the reasons certainly is that outside India, the term "Hindu" is exotic
and therefore connotes irrelevance to local situations. Another, more ominous one is that ever since
the arrival of Hare Krishna singers in our streets, "Hindu" at best connotes mildly laughable
eccentricity if not charlatanism. [1] For people who get their news and views through Christian
missionary information channels, "Hindu" connotes savage superstition, otherworldliness,
indolence, oppression and cruelty. But these reasons cannot count as valid excuses for activists with
pro-Hindu convictions working within Hindu society.

The most decent reason for avoiding the term "Hindu" might be that the corpus of Hindu literature
itself does not mention it anywhere. It is, after all, a Persian term brought to India by the Muslim
invaders. Moreover, it has a negative definition: any Indian who does not subscribe to a prophetic-
monotheist creed. It is merely the "Other" of the Muslim invaders in India. But then, it had the
advantage of uniting all Indians of different traditions and levels of culture in a single category
clearly demarcated from the predator religions Christianity and Islam. This gave the term also a
positive content, viz. their common civilizational virtues which set them apart from Christianity and
Islam: their pluralism, their freedom of thought, their reliance on genuine experience rather than
dogmatic belief. "Hindu" has therefore become a meaningful, more than merely geographical term.
Though in certain contexts a puristic preference for more ancient and native terms may be
legitimate, the term "Hindu" should be good enough for household use in the present era.
Therefore, when Hindu freedom fighters created a common platform to counter the anti-national

designs of the Muslim League, they did not hesitate to call it Hindu Mahasabha (HMS). The first
session of the All Indian Hindu Mahasabha was held at Haridwar in 1915 and was attended, among
others, by Gandhi who had not yet taken command of the Indian National Congress or become
known as Mahatma. This, then, is the main exception to the rule that modern Hindu ideologues and
organizations shun the name "Hindu". Later on HMS ideologue Y.D. Savarkar gave currency to the
neologism "Hindutva" (a somewhat uneasy combination of a Persian loan-word with a high-brow
Sanskritic suffix) through his so-titled book in 1923. He too tried to give a positive meaning to the
term "Hindu", and sought it in people's degree of rootedness in the Indian territory: a Hindu is one
for whom India is both "fatherland" and "holyland".

But barely two years later, Dr. Hedgewar, though acknowledging Savarkar's influence, called his
newly created organization "Rashtriya" (national, not "Hindu") Swayamsevak Sangh. By that time,
Gandhi had made the word Hindu to mean something less than ‘national’, and the nation had
become something more than Hindu.. The revolutionary movement in Bengal with which
Hedgewar had come in contact was also turning away from its Hindu inspiration and fighting shy of
the word ‘Hindu’ in order to lull Muslim suspicions. The name Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh has
recently been adopted by the Non-Resident Indian branches of the RSS (in whose case "national"
would mean "Trinidadian", "Canadian" etc.), but for the rest, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP,
founded in 1 964) is the only explicidy "Hindu" RSS affiliate, all others being "Rashtriya" or
"Bharatiya". These terms, in contrast to "Arya" or "Vedic" or "Sanatana Dharma" (which are not
used in the quoted BJS and BJP programmes either), are not synonyms of "Hinduism", but purely
geographical terms.

The explanation given by RSS men is that in Hedgewar's view, the nation of India was essentially
Hindu, and that the self-designation "Hindu" would merely corroborate the prevalent British (and
later, Nehruvian) demotion of the Hindus as merely one "community" among others, rather than as
the nation of India. [2] The version of the RSS's critics in the Hindu Mahasabha was and is that the
RSS was just not brave enough to affirm its natural Hindu identity against the anti-Hindu dictates of
the opinion-making establishment. It should be admitted that the tendency to identify "Hindu" with
"national" was already present in Savarkar's own definition, but the component "India as holyland"
does at least discriminate between traditions originating in India and the predatory religions
Christianity and Islam.

Among the Sangh Parivar's components, the BJP is the most emphatic in avoiding any association
with Hinduism. While other organizations somehow affi li ated with the RSS may sometimes
describe their political ideal as "Hindu Rashtra", the BJP studiously avoids such terms and prefers to
swear by "genuine secularism". When A.B. Vajpayee is asked about the notion of "Hindu Rashtra",
he declares he prefers "Bharatiya Rashtra", which, if words still have any meaning, can only denote
the already-existing "Indian state", not an ideal requiring the efforts of a "Bharatiya" political party.
American NRIs told me that when Vajpayee was invited to preside over the opening of a new
Hindu temple in the USA, he said that they should have called it a "Bharatiya temple" instead.

L.K. Advani has correctly pointed out that "the term Hindu Rashtra was never used during the Jana
Sangh days, neither had it ever been mentioned in any manifesto of the BJP". At the same time, he

reiterated the RSS theory that any Indian who "identifies with India" is thereby a Hindu: a Muslim
who satisfies this condition (what Gandhians called a "nationalist Muslim") should call himself a
"Mohammedi Hindu", a Christian should likewise be described as a "Christi Hindu". In Advani's
view, "those residing in the country are Hindus even if many of them believe in different
religions. (...) those following Islam are Mohammedi Hindus'. Likewise, Christians living in the
country are 'Christian Hindus', while Sikhs are termed 'Sikh Hindus'. The respective identities are
not undermined by such a formulation. Similarly, someone is a 'Sanatani Hindu', while the other is
an 'Arya Samaji Hindu'. It would be better if such a formulation comes to be accepted. As part of
the same concept, I consider this country to be a Hindu 'rashtra'. There is no need to convert it into
a Hindu 'rashtra'; this needs to be understood. But I certainly do not believe in forcing people to
believe in this." [3]

In theory, and at first sight, this construction could be intellectually defensible if we start from the
Hindu doctrine of the ishta devata, the "chosen deity": every Hindu has a right to worship the deity
or divine incarnation or guru whom he chooses, and this may include exotic characters like A lla h or
Jesus Christ. In practice, however, anyone can feel that something isn't right with this semantic
manipulation: Muslims and Christians abhor and mock the idea of being defined as sects within
Hinduism, and apart from a handful of multiculturalist Christians who call themselves "both Hindu
and Christian", this co-optation of Muslims and Christians into the Hindu fold has no takers. It is
actually resented, rejected and ridiculed. After all, taken to its logical extreme, it would imply that
the state of Pakistan, founded by and for Indian Muslims, i.e. "Mohammedi Hindus", is also a
Hindu Rashtra.

More than the nationalist definition of Hindu-ness developed by Savarkar (who admitted that
including Muslim in his definition of "Hindu" would stretch it too far), the clumsy notion of
"Mohammedi Hindus" brandished by the RSS-BJP is an element of an attempt to delink the term
Hinduism from its natural religious contents. [4] This broad concept of Hinduism implies the
assumption that Indian Muslims can still, in a way, be Hindus, as expressed by token BJP Muslims
who say things like: "When my ancestors accepted Islam, that didn't mean we changed our culture."
That remains to be seen: a practicing Muslim is expected to condemn Hindu idolatry and
polytheism, to have an Arabic name, to observe an Arab-originated dress code, distinct marriage
customs, food habits, and rituals of which to Hindus some are absurd (circumcision) and others
repugnant (animal sacrifice, abolished in Vedic ritual millennia ago). Adding separate traditions of
Muslim architecture, Persian- Arabic vocabulary, poetry, script and music, it is clear that in practice,
Muslim culture in India, though differing in certain externals from Muslim culture elsewhere, is
most certainly a different culture from that of the Hindus; in making that very observation during
his pro-Partition speeches, Jinnah was simply right. In spite of this, Hindutva people insist that an
“Indianized" Islam can be integrated into a Hindu nationhood.

Some go even further and accept Indian Muslims within the ambit of Hindutva without any
questions asked. Thus, veteran journalist M.V. Kamath writes in the Organiser: "Hindutva, then, is
what is common to all of us, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists... whoever has
Indian heritage. Hindutva is the engine that pulls the nation and takes us into the future. It is
cultural nationalism that has the power to unite. (...) Hindutva is not Hinduism, it does not ask

anyone to follow a particular creed or ritual. Indeed, it does not speak for Hinduism, it is not a
religious doctrine." [5] This way, the opposition between "Indian secular nationalism" and "Hindu
communalism" is declared non-existent, essentially by replacing the latter position with the former:
Klamath's conception of Hindutva is fully coterminous with Nehru's purely territorial patriotism.

But in that case, what is all the fuss about? If the Hindutva activists are merely Indian nationalists,
why don't they applaud Nehru and join the secularists? This is one more of those occasions where
Hindutva spokesmen assert something (i.e. the equivalence of Hindutva and secular nationalism) to
their own satisfaction, but fail to notice that they are convincing no one, that on the contrary
everybody derides the exercise as a cheap semantic trick, a transparent attempt to sweep profound
antagonisms between religions, or between Nehruvian secularism and Hindutva, under the carpet.

While we could live with redefinitions of the term Hindutva, which is still a neologism, there is just
no excuse when Hindutva ideologues go as far as to "secularize" the meaning of the established
term Hindu. Consider the following dialogues, one true and one imaginary, cited by an RSS stalwart
as evidence that "Hindu" simply means "Indian":

1. "When the Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid of Delhi went to Mecca on a pilgrimage, a local resident
asked him, 'Are you a Hindu?' The Imam was starded by this question and replied, 'No, I am a
Muslim.' When Imam Saheb asked him the reason for calling him a Hindu, he replied that all
'Hindustanis' were called Hindu there." [6]

2. "A Frenchman asked an Indian, 'What is your religion?' The reply was, 'Hindu.' The Frenchman
countered: 'That is your nationality; but what is your religion?"' [7]

This exercise of sanitizing the term "Hindu" from its religio -cultural contents is extremely silly.

What is the use of learning that some ignorant foreigners call the Shahi Imam a Hindu, when you
yourself know for fact that the man is an enemy of Hinduism? And what word shall we invent to
designate the phenomenon which all encyclopedias commonly call "Hinduism", once we have
imposed on the word "Hindu" the geographical-political meaning which is already satisfactorily
expressed by the words "Indian" and "Hindustani"? What is gained if the expression "Hindu-
Muslim riot" becomes replaceable with "Indian-Muslim riot"? Or if the phrase "Hindus dominate
Nepal" turns out to mean "Indians dominate Nepal"? The people of Nepal, the only Hindu Rashtra
so far, might not like it. Short, this semantic manipulation is as hopelessly transparent as a child's
very first lie. Moreover, it would imply that "Hindu Rashtra", the professed goal of this Sangh
leader, simply means "Indian state"; and this in turn would imply that the Hindutva movement is a
bunch of buffoons working for the creation of a state which has already been created long ago. [8] If
the word "Hindu" can only be used after distorting its meaning, it is perhaps just as well that the
BJP avoids using it.

Most RSS affiliates pledge allegiance to secularism, but they at least do so by emphasizing the
"secular" (meaning pluralistic) character of Hinduism, as in the VHP ad campaign: "Hindu India,
secular India". So, if Hinduism is secular, why not openly acknowledge the Hindu inspiration of the
BJP's " positive secularism"? Well, a new argument against an explicitation of the BJP's Hindu
orientation was created by a 1992 court decision under the Representation of the People Act,

prohibiting the Hindu Mahasabha from contesting elections. The reasons given by the judges were
that the HMS openly aims at founding a Hindu state and that being a Hindu (though defined very
inclusively) is a requirement for membership, as per Art.3 and Art. 5. A of the HMS constitution. In
several cases, moreover, elected candidates for the BJP or the Shiv Sena have been taken to court
for "corrupt electoral practices", meaning the "use" of religion in their campaigns; some of them
won their cases, some of them lost, but the danger inherent in openly identifying with the Hindu
cause was certainly driven home.

After the Ayodhya demolition, the Congress government threatened to outlaw the BJP on similar
grounds, but several socialist and casteist parties, the BJP's erstwhile allies in the stmggle against the
Emergency, refused to support the necessary legislative reform because they remembered all too
well how small the distance is between such rhetoric of "protecting democracy against the
communal forces" and the imposition of dictatorship. The BJP calculates that it was lucky this time
around (and the next time, viz. the Supreme Court verdict that an appeal to "Hindutva" is not a
cormpt electoral practice), but that on a future occasion, any sign of espousal of a "Hindu" agenda
may be fatal. Instead of questioning the tendency to outlaw religion as a legitimate factor in political
choices of Indian citizens, the BJP bends over backwards to adapt to it.

In Europe, with its centuries of struggle against Christian hegemony, nobody minds that the ruling
party in Germany is called Christlich-Demokratische Union, "Christian-Democratic Union". [9]
Democracy allows the citizens to decide for themselves on what basis to form political parties, so
they exercise the right to found a party committed to "Christian values", and to vote it to power.
Most Christian-Democratic parties nowadays hasten to add that these "Christian values" have
become a "common European heritage shared by non-Christians as well". But in India, any hint of
a "Hindu" party upholding "Hindu values" (even if explained as a "common Indian heritage shared
by the minorities as well") is declared intolerable by judges and journalists,— and by the leaders of
the very party concerned.

"Charlatanism" is the common allegation against traveling babas who promise instant
enlightenment by means of a simple technique; it certainly applies when they offer another magic
trick, viz. instant harmony between Hindus and Muslims by means of the "equality of religions" (or
Ram Rahim ek hai, or Ishwar Allah tere naam, etc.) mantra.

[2] Thus, M.S. Golwalkar: Bunch of Thoughts (Jagaran Prakashan, Bangalore 1980 (1966)), p.177-
178.

[3] "Advani wants Muslims to identify with 'Hindutva'", Times of India, 30/1/1995.

[4] To support this non-doctrinal, non-communal usage of the term Hindu, K.S. Sudarshan relates
some anecdotes where Arabs and Frenchmen refer to any Indian (including the Imam of Delhi's
Jama Masjid when he visited Arabia) as a "Hindu". A linguist would say that in that case, the word
Hindu is a "false friend": though sounding the same, it has a different meaning in Arabic on the one
and English or Hindi on the other hand. This is obviously no sound basis for denying the operative
(and historical, and legal) meaning of Hindu as "any Indian except Muslims, Christians and Parsis".

[5] M.V. Kamath: "The Essence of Hindutva", Organiser, 28 April 1996. If "Indian heritage" is the
unifying element, the point is precisely that Muslims and Christians reject this heritage.

[6] Adapted from Saptahik Hindustan, 1 May 1977, in K.S. Sudarshan et al.: Why Hindu Rashtra?
(Suruchi Prakashan, Delhi 1990), p.5.

[7] Ibid.; the story is an anachronism, for by now the French distinguish clearly between indien
(pertaining to the Indian territory or state) and hindou (pertaining to Hindu religion).

[8] We forego the occasion to enter the discussion on the exact meaning of the word Rashtra,
simply because it is so obvious: the word can be analyzed as "instrument (-tra) of rulership (raj)",
hence "the institution through which government is exercised", hence "state"; and not "nation" (as
some RSS stalwarts insist on asserting), the subject for whose benefit this political instmment is
created. Even if the latter meaning is accepted, the "Hindu Rashtra" is an entity which (especially
according to Sangh ideologues) has been in existence for ages, viz. the Hindu nation.

[9] A Gandhian secularist remarked about this comparison that "Christian-Democratic" refers to a
well-defined "Christian" identity, and that there is no Indian equivalent to this, since "Hinduism" is
but an undefined conglomerate. In fact, when the German Christian-Democratic Union was
founded, fifty years ago, Protestants and Catholics were still mutually hostile religions, and it was
something of a revolution to create a joint political platform representing the values they held in
common. A fortiori, the different "Hindu" traditions (which do not have a history of religious wars
against one another, as Catholicism and Protestantism do) can quite legitimately be united for
political purposes on a common platform.

4. The BJP flag

A "Hindu” or non-Hindu party name would matter littie if the policies behind it would be the right
ones, but as we shall demonstrate, the avoidance of a Hindu self-designation goes hand in hand
with the avoidance of certain pressing Hindu concerns in the party's policies. While we are
discussing the party's self-presentation, we may add to our doubts about the chosen name, the
question of the party's flag. Many party workers are embarrassed with the green-saffron flag, and I
want to give a voice to their misgivings.

When the BJP was founded, a new flag was devised: "two vertical colours, saffron and green, in the
ratio of 2:1, with the election symbol of the Party [lotus flower] in blue colour in the middle of the
saffron portion equal to half its size. The green portion will be near the mast."[l] Why the green
part? When questioned, more than one BJP spokesman will try to conceal the simple truth, e.g. by
arguing that this was the flag of the unified Janata Party of 1977-79, of which the new BJP had
claimed the heritage. [2] In reality, the Janata Party had its colours in vertical instead of horizontal
juxtaposition, and no lotus flower, so the BJP flag was definitely a newly designed flag.

The Hindu Mahasabha flag was and is saffron, adorned with several Hindu symbols. Shivaji's flag
was plain saffron and is still used by the Shiv Sena as well as by the RSS. The old Jan Sangh flag was
saffron, adorned only with a lamp. Whatever else may be said of these organizations, they have
pledged allegiance to Hinduism at least at the level of visual symbolism. Of course, this colour does
not necessarily imply a bold commitment to Hinduism: when challenged by secularists about this
shameless expression of Hindu inspiration, Hindutva spokesmen so inclined can always wriggle out
by saying that the saffron flag is just a conventional symbol, a historical remnant, in fact the original
pre-Independence Congress choice as the secular national flag, or some such disclaimer. Yet, upon
being constituted as a new party in 1 980, the BJP chose to betray even that merely symbolic link
with Hinduism.

The BJP's flag, like the Congress and Republic flags, is one-third green. The green was added as the
symbol of Islam as a permanent declaration that the new party was Muslim- friendly. This is a more
extreme case of Muslim appeasement than the inclusion of green in the national flag.

Firstly, as a classical tricolour scheme, the Indian flag, unlike the BJP flag, may be read as just
another instance of the traditional Indo-European scheme of three qualities (triguna) found in most
tricolour flags: white as representing the serene (sattvika) quality, saffron or red for the energetic
(rajasika) quality, and a dark colour for the material (tamasika) quality. The dark colour can vary
between different Indo-European cultures, and may be black, brown, blue or even green; in which
case, green has a natural non-communal symbol value in a Vedic cosmological scheme. This way,
the Congress /Republic flag at least satisfies certain patterns of universal symbolism; by contrast, the
imposition of a green part on the BJP flag admits of no interpretation except as a kow-tow to Islam.

In a future post-communal era, the said triguna symbolism may become the official explanation of

the Republic flag's colour division, but its historical genesis was of course communal: during the
Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai era of Congress collaboration with the (intrinsically anti-national) Khilafat
agitation, Muslim mili tants and their Hindu sympathizers inside the Congress insisted on including
green, conventionally the emblematic colour of the desert religion, Islam. The Congress Flag
Committee (1931) proposed the plain saffron flag (with blue charkha) as a historically rooted, truly
national flag for independent India. [3] Disregarding the Committee's advice, the Congress
leadership opted once more for the tricolour scheme which was commonly understood to signify a
pledge of allegiance to both Hinduism and Islam. But then, secondly, the Indian National Congress
had at least the excuse of being pressed by Muslim communalist party members into adopting this
communal colour scheme. The BJP has no such excuse: the number of Muslims present when the
flag was designed, was negligeable, and these BJP Muslims (always paraded as truly "nationalist
Muslims") are not known to have pressed any demands on this.

Moreover, thirdly, the Congress had to devise a national flag somehow representative of a nation
which it conceived as "composite" and "multi-religious", not the symbol of a party representing a
single ideology. By contrast, the BJP merely had to choose a party flag, representative only of its
own political identity. Entirely by its own choice, the BJP leadership chose to burden a party which
thrives on Hindu votes, with a symbol of subservience to the religion which killed millions of
Hindus, including hundreds of thousands within our own lifetime. Many ordinary BJP and Sangh
Parivar workers have expressed their dismay about this imposition, and identify A.B. Vajpayee as
the crucial influence in giving the party flag a Muslim colour; though I would add that after all, the
majority of the party leadership must have voted to accept their choice. The problem lies not with a
few individuals; in different degrees, it affects the BJP if not the Sangh cadre as a whole.

Like the flag, many policies of the BJP are one-third Islamic. When Prime Minister V.P. Singh
earmarked 5 million Rupees for the beautification of the Jama Masjid in Delhi, run by Singh's ally
Imam Bukhari, Organiser protested loudly against this "blatant" case of "Muslim appeasement". But
when Bhairon Singh Shekhawat became BJP Chief Minister in Rajasthan (admittedly in coalition
with the more pro-Muslim Janata Dal), one of the first things he did was to grant 67 million Rupees
for the beautification of the Ajmer mausoleum of Muinuddin Chishti, a Sufi saint who preached
against "idolatry" and who was buried on the site of a demolished Hindu temple. Doubtlessly, the
BJP did this to prove its "secularism", though it is not clear what could be secular about the
monument of a Sufi fanatic, built with materials of destroyed Hindu temples. Orthodox biographies
of Muinuddin say in so many words that he invited Mohammed Ghori for destroying the Chauhan
Kingdom and establishing Islam, and that he accepted as a gift from Allah the daughter of a Hindu
Prince who had been captured by Muslim raiders and presented to him. Reports of the
Archaeological Survey of India have found pieces of many Hindu idols embedded in buildings all
over the sprawling dargah.

The promised crackdown on illegal immigrants from Bangladesh (not really communal, merely the
implementation of existing laws, but somehow vilified as communal) never materialized in any of
the BJP-ruled states. The only state where an attempt was made, though without any substantial
results, is Maharashtra, where it is left to the Shiv Sena to claim the credit for this slightly tougher
policy. The BJP has a "Minority Cell", and its members are expected to be exemplary Muslims,

dutifully interrupting committee meetings for namaz.

Whether one applauds or deplores it, the actual facts are that the BJP, like the pre-Independence
Congress, goes out of its way to put some token Muslims or Muslim symbols on display. Whatever
the BJP may say about "Muslim appeasement" by Congress, its own record in this regard shows
that it is equally subservient to the chimera of Muslim-certified secularism.

[1] BJP Constitution and Rules (1987 ed.), p.4.

[2] This was the explanation given in 1990 by the RSS Baudhik Pramukh (overseer for intellectual
development) for Maharashtra to historian Shrikant Talageri (personal communication, December
1995).

[3] The story is told by K.R. Malkani: The Politics of Ayodhya and Hindu-Muslim Relations (Har-
Anand Publ., Delhi 1993), p.175-179.

5. How the Rama card was
thrown away

Ever since the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1996, the BJP was as silent as
possible on the Ayodhya issue. It is just too embarrassed, and avoids mentioning the very name of
Ayodhya or Rama. On 17 December 1992 already, A.B. Vajpayee declared in the Lok Sabha: "We
are very sad at what happened in Ayodhya on the 6th December." L.K. Advani, who had been the
front man of the Ayodhya movement until he broke down in tears at the sight of the demolition,
had narrowly succeeded in making a dignified statement during his first press meet after the
demolition (thanks to the insistent prodding of one of his well-wishers who merely happened to be
present, and who convinced Advani to replace the weak and apologetic statement which his
assistant had prepared with a better one), but more recently he too joined Vajpayee in dismissing
the historic event as a "Himalayan blunder".

Of course, most of us would have preferred a smooth unopposed transition from misplaced
mosque to fitting temple in Ayodhya, but in the circumstances, the prospects for temple
construction without this direct action were bleak. All that the BJP had achieved at the purely
political level was to provoke the 1991 Places of Worship Act, which freezes the status of places of
worship as it was in the colonial age (depriving them of the benefits of independence). Therefore, in
their comments, the BJP leaders should have shown some appreciation for the constraints which
drove the Kar Sevaks to make possible the construction for which Advani c.s. had been
campaigning.

I still have a high opinion of Mr. Advani personally, but he has proved to be a true representative of
this confused tendency which I call BJP secularism. Trying to be nice to everyone is fine, but should
one enter politics and defy a formidable enemy like Islam (which Advani had done by implicidy
challenging Islam's right to usurp a Hindu sacred site) if one is not prepared for some rough
weather? With but few exceptions, such as Kalyan Singh and Vijay Kumar Malhotra, most BJP
leaders now take the evasive or apologetic line on Ayodhya.

The truth of the matter is that the BJP leadership never had its heart in the Ayodhya campaign.
When outside factors and the VHP brought the Ayodhya issue centre-stage in the mid-80s, the BJP
joined the movement because of its apparent potential for mass mobilization. Yet, even after the
VHP's Ram Shila Pujas (consecrating bricks in every village and taking them in procession to
Ayodhya, autumn 1989) became a roaring success, it took Prime Minister V.P. Singh's prodding to
get the BJP to organize the fabled Rath Yatra (October 1990). Singh had made the ludicrous
promise to Imam Bukhari of securing the disputed site for the Muslim community, and he needed
some serious Hindu pressure to provide him with an excuse to renege on his promise. [1] After
riding the Rama wave to an electoral breakthrough in May-June 1991, the BJP started distancing
itself from the Ayodhya issue. By 6 December 1992, many activists had lost patience with the BJP,

and a vanguard group organized the historic instance of direct action, all while keeping the BJP
leadership (deemed the weakest link in the Hindutva chain) in the dark.

When the Babri walls came tumbling down, L.K. Advani, who had looked like such a divine hero in
his Ram Rath, could not help shedding tears over the damage done to the BJP's secular self-image.
The same thing happened to many BJP office-bearers at the Delhi headquarters when they heard
the news about the demolition (so I was told by one of them). Even VHP leader Ashok Singhal,
certainly more sincere in his Ayodhya commitment than the politicians, tried to stop the activists,
until they threatened to pull off his dhoti if he didn't shut up. If we are to believe the secularist
commentators, all that was theatre. Well, no, it was quite genuine; just as genuine as Murli Manohar
Joshi's jubilation, which was gleefully highlighted by the same secularists.

If the Indian media were not as corrupt as they are (power corrupts, and the media wield
tremendous power, so), they would have found out and told us who exactly masterminded the
demolition; it was not so hard to find out. But instead, the Indian media spurned the scoop of the
year and insisted on the politically more useful version blaming Mr. Advani, somewhat like
Jawaharlal Nehru's attempt to implicate Veer Savarkar in the Mahatma Gandhi murder.

Frightened by the Muslim-cum-secularist sound and fury after the demolition, and shocked by its
own failure to live up to its secular and disciplined self-image, the BJP completed its (until then
gradual) retreat from Ayodhya overnight. Even four years later, any talk of a return to the Ayodhya
plank was dismissed by the party leadership as absurd. As party spokesperson Sushma Swaraj said
(November 1996), in an unabashed show of opportunism as the only guide in the party's choices:
"You cannot cash a cheque twice." Until then, one could have thought that the BJP's silence on
Ayodhya was part of a reasoned policy of shifting the focus of action to the judicial debate before
the Allahabad High Court, which has been deliberating on the dispute since 1950 (the Court's
pussyfooting is itself one of the causes of the polarizing and violent turn which the dispute has
taken), but has recendy been showing real signs of life; now, Ms. Swaraj's statement proves that
there is no deep strategy involved, merely a tactic of grabbing whichever vote-catching issues
present themselves, and dropping them when they become less useful or too difficult to handle.

The BJP's enemies spread two mutually exclusive views of the BJP: that it is a rabid fundamentalist
party bound to turn India into a theocracy, and that it is a placid opportunistic party which merely
uses religion for its all too mundane goal of enjoying the spoils of power. Recent developments
have given a verdict between these two, in favour of the opportunism theory.

The BJP's next election campaigns featured harmless secular slogans like "good government" (su-
ra j), though a few candidates in Hindutva-sensitized areas in U.P. also tried to capitalize on the
Demolition, boasting that "we did what we promised". Still, the secular non-Ayodhya profile cost
the party many seats in the 1996 U.P. state elections (as Kalyan Singh has admitted), losses not fully
compensated by the party's gains in other districts, which were often due to the disunity in the anti-
BJP camp. This was the first sign that the BJP cannot go on taking the Hindu voter for granted
indefinitely. On the other hand, the 1995 state elections in Maharashtra and Gujarat and the 1996
Lok Sabha elections were undeniably victories for the BJP. So, the secularists in the BJP feel assured

that Hindu activism is dead, or is at any rate not a vote attractor. Yet, this secular posturing may
also prove to be a "cheque which cannot be cashed twice", for the BJP's credibility as a provider of
clean and effective governance has plummeted. The performance of its state governments and the
recent corruption and defection scandals have confirmed to the public what party insiders have
been telling me for some years: the party leadership has no greater ambition than to be the
Congress B-team.

Just like Congress has been capitalizing on the sacrifices of the Freedom movement for decades, the
BJP tries to capitalize on its association with the Hindu cause. The equation of the BJP with militant
Hinduism is now mosdy kept alive by its enemies (who, fortunately for the BJP, dominate the
media). The effect is that the BJP can take the Hindu-minded voter for granted all while fishing
after the non-Hindu and the anti-Hindu vote, and making the concomitant concessions. But the
real commitment to the Hindu cause is now as far removed from the BJP leadership's thinking as
Gandhian ideals are from the most corrupt Congress leader.

A movement having the size of the Ayodhya agitation can only make sense if major historical issues
are involved, in this case the role of Islam in Indian history, of which the destruction of the Rama
temple and its replacement with a mosque are perfectly representative. Therefore, historians like
Harsh Narain, G.L. Verma, K.S. Lai and Sita Ram Goel responded to the Ayodhya controversy by
collecting and presenting several types of evidence for the thousands upon thousands of temple
destructions wrought by Islam in India, and by pinpointing the large and unambiguous scriptural
basis for this Islamic iconoclasm. They faced the fact that it is not possible to raise the Ayodhya
issue in a consistent and credible way without tracing the problem to its source, viz. the Quran and
the model behaviour of prophet Mohammed, who destroyed all the idols in the Kaaba and had all
traces of other religions in Arabia removed or destroyed.

By contrast, the BJP tried to redefine the Ayodhya debate away from its religious basis and into a
matter of secular patriotism: the "national hero" Rama versus the "foreign invader" Babar. In reality,
of course, nationality or geographical provenance had nothing to do with it: the native convert
Malik Kafur was a great temple-destroyer, while the foreign British colonizer left temples in peace
and even invested men and money in their upkeep and scholarly description.

BJP supporters started claiming that Islam itself condemns temple destruction and that a prayer
offered in a mosque built on a destroyed temple is held to be invalid by Islam itself. In essence, they
claimed Ayodhya for the Hindus in the name of Islam. One Hindu professor even revealed to me
that the Islamic agitators had falsified Islamic scripture to make it sound hostile to Hinduism while
originally it had been quite in agreement with Hindu scripture. The capacity of Hindus for self-
deception is truly extraordinary. They can invent any fairy-tale just to avoid facing the fact that
Islam has declared war on Hinduism in the 7th century AD and that it has never rescinded this
declaration of war.

But of course, no one was fooled. Not one Muslim replied: "Now you come to mention it, this
mosque has been standing there illegally for centuries without any of us realizing it. Our Quran
orders us to remove this nuisance to make way for a Hindu temple." All the Rafiq Zakarias and

Asghar AH Engineers, always so eager to extol the tolerance and magnanimity of Islam, unitedly
refused to oblige the BJP spokesmen, and solidly defended the right of Muslims to occupy the
sacred sites of others (it was only after the much-maligned Demolition that Wahiduddin Khan and
Asghar Ali Engineer came to their senses and wisely advised Muslims not to press for the
reimposition of a mosque on this Hindu sacred site).

This wilful confusion and half-heartedness about the issues inherendy raised by the Ayodhya
controversy made it impossible for the BJP to state its case, or rather Hindu society's case, in a
straightforward and convincing manner. While thousands of mosques have forcibly displaced
temples, the VHP demand was for just three, and the BJP narrowed that figure down to one. Seen
in the proper perspective, this was incredibly modest: the guilt of Islam is staggering, yet the Hindu
fundamentalist party is satisfied with its abandonment of one sacred site which was not under
Muslim control anyway. But in the BJP perspective, this extremely modest demand came to look
unreasonable and fanatical ("such a nationwide fuss over a mere building"), precisely because the
whole context of the staggering guilt of Islam was kept out of the debate as much as possible.

Consider the result of the Ayodhya campaign. While it is totally obvious that a Hindu sacred site
belongs to the Hindus and to no one else, all the non-fringe Indian media strongly condemned the
Hindu reappropriation of the Ram Janmabhoomi site. While no religious Westerner or East Asian
would approve of the take-over of the sacred sites of his own religion by outsiders, Western and
East Asian media (not to speak of Muslim media) were united in their strong condemnation when
Hindus tried to undo just such a take-over. While in other conflicts (say, the Gulf War) both
warring parties end up getting some moral or actual support from somewhere, in this case there was
no trace of support for the Hindu position anywhere in the world. The Ayodhya campaign was
conducted in such a way as to leave Hindu society totally bereft of friends. Without exaggeration,
the BJP's Ayodhya campaign was the single biggest public relations disaster in world history.

The BJP has never subjected itself to the critical introspection which this experience called for. To
be sure, it disliked the opprobrium intensely, but it merely tried to wriggle out from under it,
dispensing with the trouble of making a proper evaluation and of articulating a consistent stand.
There is no such thing as a Hindutva-inspired analysis of the difference which the Demolition has
made for the Hindu cause in general or even for the Sangh's or the BJP's strategic position
specifically. The numerous publications on the significance of the Demolition are all by secularists
and Muslims. Without doing any analysis of its own, the BJP effectively plumped for the secularist
view that the Demolition was wrong, and compromised the whole Ayodhya movement along with
it. So, it kind of apologized and changed the subject.

[1] It may be recalled that some of V.P. Singh's scheming on Ayodhya was made public by Arun
Shourie, the only editor who had opened his columns for articles on the history of Islamic
iconoclasm; and that a short while later, he was sacked as Indian Express editor. One of the hands
behind his removal was Nana Deshmukh, supposedly a Hindutva stalwart.

6. Sangh Parivar, the last
Gandhians

When in 1980, the secularist tendency led by Nana Deshmukh and Atal Behari Vajpayee imposed
"Gandhian socialism" on the newly founded BJP as its official ideology, all the establishment
secularists laughed at this transparent attempt to acquire a new secular identity. [1] "This party is
neither Gandhian nor socialist", they said. The party was in fact more socialist than it would like to
admit after liberalization became the new orthodoxy, certainly more socialist than the non-socialist
"cleverest bourgeois scoundrel" Gandhi ever was, but we can agree that it was less socialist than was
normative in 1980. What interests us more, is whether the BJP, always accused of having historical
links with Gandhi's assassin, can legitimately be called Gandhian.

My view is that within the present political spectmm, the BJP is definitely and by far the most
Gandhian party. The former socialists and populists, who had inherited part of the Gandhian legacy
through Jayaprakash Narayan, have become nothing but casteist interest groups steeped in coercive
tactics and crime; there is nothing Gandhian about them anymore. Congress, of course, presided
over the betrayal of every single Gandhian policy under Nehru's Prime Ministership, and its level of
morality and dedication to the nation is nothing that Gandhi would be proud of.

By contrast, the BJP, or rather the Sangh Parivar as a whole, is definitely a Gandhian movement in
many respects. The Sangh Parivar supports economic self-reliance (swadeshi) coupled with cultural
self-reliance. The Sangh workers shun luxury and move around by public transport, in the lowest-
class compartments; in communications as well as in their martial arts practice (with the stick), they
are deliberately settling for older technology, quite comparable to Gandhi's choice for living in the
past with his charkha. Sangh whole-timers practise the typically Gandhian mix of politics and
asceticism (including sexual abstinence). The Sangh protests against Miss World flesh shows, the
promotion of meat consumption by American fast food chains, the unnecessary and dismptive
promotion of tooth paste at the expense of indigenous methods of dental hygiene, and other
instances of dumping India's heritage in favour of undesirable and/ or foreign alternatives. This
earns Sangh activists haughty smirks from the elite, but that itself is yet another point in common
with Gandhi and his spinning-wheel.

In some respects, the RSS follows Gandhi even where Gandhi was decidedly un-Hindu. The
seeming unwillingness to use the modern-most technology and media (which is gradually being
superseded by modernizing efforts originating largely in NRI circles) is Gandhian enough, but is
unwarranted from a Hindu viewpoint. The ancient Hindus in the Indus-Saraswati civilization were
in the vanguard of humanity in science and technology; Gandhi had his retro-mania from Christian
romantics like Thoreau and Tolstoy. The combination of social work with celibacy is characteristic
of certain Roman Catholic monastic orders, but is foreign to Hindu tradition, where a clean
separation is maintained between, on the one hand, the self-supporting worldly society, which takes

care of its needy and in which every able-bodied young man is expected to start a family, and on the
other hand the circles of celibate sadhus from whom no worldly service is required because their
spiritual practice is contribution enough.

Three central aspects of the Sangh's work are typically Gandhian, and are also the key to its success.
One is its grass-roots work, its impressive record in actual social service, which is far larger and
more deserving of a Nobel prize than Mother Teresa's heavily foreign-financed operations. Like for
Mahatma Gandhi, politics for the Sangh is but one aspect of a much larger social programme
carried out by the citizens' own initiative and effort. This creates a much closer rapport with the
masses, a movement with much stronger roots than purely political movements like the Hindu
Mahasabha.

The second Gandhi-like aspect of the Sangh's success is its religious dimension. Though the BJP
insists on its secular character, many of the Sangh-affiliated organizations and individuals are not
that shy about their Hindu moorings, and this is precisely one of the reasons why they strike a
chord of confidence among the people. Tilak, Aurobindo and Gandhi made the independence
movement into a mass movement by giving it a religious dimension; it is for the same reason that
the Sangh has become a mass movement firmly rooted in the general population, a pool of Hindu
commitment on which the BJP can draw at voting time.

The third Gandhian trait in the Sangh's style of functioning is the moral dimension which it gives to
its politics. The BJP advertises itself as a disciplined party free of corruption. When during the 1996
Lok Sabha election campaign, Narasimha Rao's men tried to implicate L.K. Advani in a financial
scandal, the public reacted with a sincere disbelief: he may be a communalist, but we never saw any
sign of corruption in him. My own experience confirms that in general, the workers of the Sangh-
affiliated organizations are sincerely dedicated to the well-being of their country and society without
expecting personal benefits in return. [2] Of late, this reputation has been corroded by scandals
involving the BJP (though it remains the cleanest party by far), and even RSS grassroots recruitment
is feeling the effect of the general spread of consumerism in Hindu society. Traditionally, Hindus
have held self-abnegation as practiced by Sangh workers in high esteem, but many members of the
new generation (yuppie or goonda) merely find it funny; the RSS-Gandhian ethos has now become
an upstream effort defying the spirit of the times.

The kinship between the Sangh and Gandhi is real enough in these positive aspects, but it is just as
palpable in some negative respects. To start with a small but nasty point, Gandhi thought his own
position (call it the Gandhian sampradaya/ sect) represented the whole of Hinduism, both at the
political and the religio-philosophical level, and strongly resented alternative centres of Hindu
mobilization. Though calling himself a Hindu, he claimed the leadership of the whole nation and
not just of the Hindus, though the British secularists and the Muslims never conceded this more-
than-Hindu identity to him (certainly a parallel with the Bharatiya rather than Hindu Janata Party).
When the Muslim League became a formidable challenger to Gandhi's claim, it would have been in
the nation's and his own interest to let the Hindu Mahasabha counterbalance the League's influence;
moderates normally use the presence of radicals as a useful bargaining-chip. But Gandhi and his
Congress wanted the whole Hindu cake to themselves.

The same intolerance of or at least annoyance with rivals for the Hindu constituency is in evidence
in the Sangh. In surveys of Sangh history, there is remarkably little reference to the Hindu
Mahasabha and other Hindu organizations. Especially glaring is the RSS reluctance to acknowledge
the role of Babarao Savarkar (elder brother of V. D. Savarkar and an outstanding revolutionary in
his own right). It was Babarao who had drafted the original RSS pledge and included the term
Hindu Rashtra in it. He had suggested the saffron RSS flag. He had merged his own Tarun Hindu
Sabha as well as Sant Panchelgaonkar Maharaj’s Mukteshwar Dal into the fledgling RSS. He was
responsible for bringing into the RSS such luminaries as Bhalji Pendharkar, the noted film director
and later the Dadasaheb Phalke award winner Kashinath Pant Limaye who became the provincial
head of the Maharashtra RSS, Babu Padmaraj Jain and other. Baburao toured extensively for the
RSS in spite of his failing health. Both Hedgewar and Golwalkar had great respect for Babarai. Yet
The RSS Story by K. R. Malkani does not even mention Babarao’s name. In fact some narrow
minded RSS leaders from Pune had tempered with the chapter in Babarao’s contribution (written
by P. N. Gokhale) that deals with Babarao’s contribution to the growth of the RSS. Similarly, no
acknowledgement is made of the help which the RSS received from the Arya Samaj and the Hindu
Mahasabha everywhere.

During the 1989 elections, when the BJP had an electoral alliance with the Janata Dal, Balraj
Madhok stood as a candidate for the reconstituted Bharatiya Jan Sangh against the Janata Dal
candidate in Lucknow. Most Hindutva people were eager to work for Madhok, "one of us", against
the JD secularist officially supported by the BJP. When Madhok looked sure to win the election,
Vajpayee hurried to Lucknow to discipline the BJP workers; he could not tolerate that a non-BJP
man would enter the Lok Sabha in spite of his proven merit for the Hindu cause.

In a way, the Sangh attitude mirrors that of mendacious secularists who always label anyone
speaking up for the Hindus as an "RSS man": they identify the Hindu cause with the Sangh.
Generally they do not see beyond the confines of the Sangh and are practically unaware that there
are conscious Hindus outside the Sangh.

A typical Gandhian flaw in BJP functioning, the result of mixing self-denial (a personal discipline)
with politics (a public affair), is the absence of any healthy sense of quid pro quo. Gandhi always
sacrificed Indian or Hindu interests without asking anything in return, hoping that this would soften
the heart of the beneficiary and put him in the right mood to give something back at his own
initiative. Thus, after the outbreak of World War 1, "Indian political leaders, 'moderate' as well as
'extremist', were unanimous that the people of India should support the British cause against the
Germans, but only for a price: the promise of home rule after the war. Gandhi was almost alone in
rejecting the idea of a political bargain with the British; he cherished the hope that in return for
unconditional support, a grateful and victorious Britain would give India her due when the war was
over. "[3] As it turned out, the British took Gandhi's services (recruiting Indian volunteers to die a
useless and horrible death in the war against Germans who had done the Indians no harm) but,
except for an embarrassing medal of loyal service to the British Empire, they gave him nothing in
return. In the real world, politicians bargain for a tangible quid pro quo and don't count on
gratitude.

This Gandhian idiosyncrasy has set a trend in Indian foreign policy. In his infamous 1954 "Panch

shed" treaty with China, Nehru conceded China's claim to Tibet but extracted no Chinese
acceptance of India's established borders in return. In the Indo-Pak wars, Indian successes on the
battlefield were squandered in Nehru's vainglorious attempt to posture as an apostle of
internationalism (bringing in the UNO in the Kashmir dispute, 1948), or as an occasion to show off
India's sportsmanship (ceding the territory conquered in 1965), or in return for a meaningless
declaration of good intent (releasing the Pakistani prisoners for a never-kept promise to keep the
Kashmir issue bilateral in 1971). In 1996, India parted with a large percentage of the Ganga water
supply in an empty show of generosity to Bangladesh, effectively hurting its own agriculture and
shipping industry, without even asking anything in return: not that Bangladesh treat the Hindu
minority correctly, not that it restore the Chakma lands to its Chakma refugees, not that it take back
its illegal Muslim migrants, not that it close its borders to separatist guerrilla groups terrorizing
India's northeast.

In this habit of making unilateral gestures to undeserving enemies, Gandhi had no followers more
imitative than the BJP. This party always sells out its principles and pays homage to everything and
everyone its enemies cherish, without ever exacting even a promise (let alone a real bargain) in
return. No matter how many concessions A.B. Vajpayee offered during his 13-day tenure as Prime
Minister in search of a majority, no matter how hard he kicked his Kashmiri refugee supporters in
the groin by promising to preserve Art. 370, no matter how sincerely he condemned the Ayodhya
demolition, he did not get a single undertaking from a non-" communal" parliamentarian to support
the government during the confidence vote. No matter how deep the BJP leaders crawl in the dust
begging for certificates of good secular conduct from their enemies, this has never yielded them
anything except contempt. But so far, everything indicates that they can be counted upon to
continue in the same direction.

[1] We omit discussion of the lack of an agreed meaning for the term "Gandhian socialism". An
insider told me that during one of the constituent meetings of the budding BJP, a vote was taken on
whether the ideology should be "integral humanism" or "Gandhian socialism"; the latter won with a
small majority, but to please everyone, it was then decided that the "Gandhian socialism" is actually
the same thing as "integral humanism". The incident reveals the lack of ideological seriousness in
the BJP. Similar illustrations of this weakness include Govindacharya's 1996 enthusiasm for "social
engineering", a term dear to totalitarian regimes by which he meant simply the induction of more
Backward Caste candidates in the elections.

[2] It is a different matter that this personal modesty is often combined with a lack of collective
Sangh modesty. Many Sangh workers are extremely touchy about criticism of the Sangh, even when
they don't mind criticism of Hinduism or India.

[3] B.R. Nanda: Gandhi and his Critics (OUP, Delhi 1993), p.l 1 6.

7. Gandhian Non-Violence

One point where the BJP seems to be decidedly un-Gandhian is defence policy. Whereas Gandhi
had advocated a stricdy non-violent strategy including an unarmed defence against the impending
Japanese invasion, the BJP advocates a strong defence capability including weapons of mass
destruction. Yet, even here the BJP is more Gandhian than one would expect.

The famous quotation of Mahatma Gandhi on Hindu cowards and Muslim bullies deserves to be
read in full: "There is no doubt in my mind that in the majority 7 of quarrels the Hindus come out
second best. But my own experience confirms the opinion that the Mussalman as a rule is a bully,
and the Hindu as a rule is a coward. I have noticed this in railway trains, on public roads, and in the
quarrels which I had the privilege of settling. Need the Hindu blame the Mussalman for his
cowardice? Where there are cowards, there will always be bullies. They say that in Saharanpur the
Mussalmans looted houses, broke open safes and, in one case, a Hindu woman's modesty was
outraged. Whose fault was this? Mussalmans can offer no defence for the execrable conduct, it is
true. But I, as a Hindu, am more ashamed of Hindu cowardice than I am angry at the Mussalman
bullying. Why did not the owners of the houses looted die in the attempt to defend their
possessions? Where were the relatives of the outraged sister at the time of the outrage? Have they
no account to render of themselves? My non-violence does not admit of running away from danger
and leaving dear ones unprotected. Between violence and cowardly flight, I can only prefer violence
to cowardice. "[1]

Gandhi declares that the owners of the looted houses ought to have chosen to "die in the attempt
to defend their possessions". But why should the lawful owner die, in punishment of what crime? If
anyone has to die at all, would it not be more fair, more just, to let the aggressor die rather than his
victim? Justice does not figure in Gandhi's calculus of non-violence at all. People should innocendy
die as some kind of moral gesture rather than inflict a just punishment on the aggressor: a morbid
kind of personal asceticism eclipses any socially responsible concern for public justice. Or does
Gandhi mean that people should expose themselves to the risk of dying by fighting the aggressor
rather than flee? While Gandhi did make many morbid and ridiculous statements about the virtue
of getting killed (e.g. about the cows willingly offering themselves to the tiger until the tiger gets
tired of beef and turns vegetarian), here he says: "I prefer violence to cowardice." Gandhi is
ashamed that Hindus failed to put up an effective self-defence, and wants them to do better next
time.

Here, for once, Gandhi seems to link up with a whole tradition of mature thinkers who have taken
a proportionalist view of the acceptability of violence: in cases where force can reasonably be
expected to make the difference (not when the situation is hopeless, as pointed out by Thomas
Aquinas in his theory of "just war"), it is lawful to use force to ward off aggression. In its own view
of itself, the RSS has precisely taken up the challenge formulated here by Gandhi: "Need the Hindu
blame the Mussalman for his own cowardice?" Gandhi calls on Hindus not to be cowards in the

face of Muslim bullies. In response, the RSS claims it builds martial qualities and equips its workers
with the strength to face bullies. There is nothing un-Gandhian about RSS martial arts practice.
Even the Shiv Sena, the Mumbai Mafia which organized the defence of the Hindus when the
Muslims were starting a pogrom in January 1993 could claim to have done Gandhi's bidding (and
then overdone it a bit; but Gandhi too used to overdo things).

But then there is the other, unrealistic face of Gandhi, the morbid face of "when slapped, turn the
other cheek". Even in this extremist view of non-violence, the RSS is often a follower of Gandhi.
During the Khalistani separatist struggle in Panjab (1981-93), hundreds of RSS and BJP men were
killed by the Khalistanis, yet this did not provoke a single act of retaliation. When in ca. 1990, and
again in 1996, Communist militants started killing RSS men in Kerala, the RSS was very slow to
react in kind. The Islamic bomb attacks on Sangh centres in Chennai and elsewhere, the murders of
BJP politicians in UP, Mumbai and elsewhere, they all have not provoked any counter-attacks. Anti-
Hindu governments in Bihar and West Bengal have achieved some success in preventing the
growth of sizable RSS chapters by means of mthless intimidation and violence, all without having to
fear any RSS retaliation.

The RSS often celebrates its "martyrs", which it calls "shahid", unmindful of the fact that this is a
stricdy Islamic term. [2] The word shahid is related to shahada ("witnessing", viz. to the two tmth
claims of the Islamic creed: there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet), and means
"a witness [to the Islamic faith]", i.e. one who has fallen during Islam's war against the unbelievers.
To use this term for an unbeliever killed by the believers is an insult to both sides. Honouring those
who died for the cause is fine, but the thing to note is that the RSS never honours those who killed
for the cause. Muslims at least honour the kafir-killer (ghazi) along with the martyr (shahid), but the
Sangh follows Gandhi in choosing to extol dying rather than killing for the cause.

Is this, then, a plea for more violence? Should the RSS start to live up to its mediatic image of "the
world's largest private militia"? Should it drop its stick-fighting gymnastics and move on to more
realistic training with AK-47s? That is the plea which I sometimes hear from younger Hindutva
activists. Frustrated by the leadership's appeasement policies, they want action, they want to "teach
them a lesson" (i.e. to the Muslims). It has been done before: during Partition, Sangh workers were
quite active in taking revenge on Muslims inside India (as eyewitnesses have told me), doing some
bullying of their own, though I am not aware of similar martial RSS feats in the territory allotted to
Pakistan. [3] At any rate, the use of force seems to be the only alternative they can imagine for the
confused and weak-kneed policies of the present leadership.

Now that Hindus have practically disappeared from Pakistan and Bangladesh, in the future most
Hindu-Muslim killing will take place in India, where Hindus are in a good position to kill a great
many Muslims. Of course, the time is near when the quality of Muslim armament will catch up with
its already large quantity (to divulge a police public-secret tabooed in secularist publications on
riots), and Muslim "revenge" operations of the Mumbai explosions (12 March 1993) type can
become a routine affair. Still, in the next few decades the non-Muslim army and police will remain a
decisive factor blocking the way to a definitive defeat of Hindus by Muslims in India, though they
may remain unable (mostly because their hands are tied by politicians) to stamp out anti-Hindu and

anti-Indian terrorism and armed separatism. Given this configuration of forces, I certainly take the
possibility into account that Hindu militant groups may develop, which will try to setde newly
arising communal confrontations by means of "direct action", probably starting with the Kashmir-
type situation which is developing in the northeast. I think it is in Hindu society's interest to avert
such a development by means of ideological warfare.

If Hindus want to win the life-and-death stmggle with Islam, they will have to do it in a Hindu, not
in an Islamic way. Some Hindutva activists quote with approving bluster Veer Savarkar's dictum
that for every Hindu woman dishonoured by Muslims, a Muslim woman (if not a dozen Muslim
women) should be given the same treatment; and that such retaliation would quickly teach the
Muslims to behave. I am told that to this view of Savarkar's, Swami Karpatri, that genuine Hindu
fundamentalist if ever there was one, has replied that defending Hinduism against Islam makes little
sense if it means interiorizing Islamic attitudes: "When a dog has bitten you, does it mean that you
have to bite back?" Perhaps giving tit for tat creates a good feeling at the time of the act, but a
movement which wants to be the vanguard of Hindu civilization has to aim higher than that.

The Hindu value of ahimsa, so prominently praised as the "highest dharma" in the Mahabharata, is
not the same thing as passive masochism, whatever Gandhi may have read into it. Even so, ahimsa
does imply a restraint on the use of violence. Force is sometimes necessary, as Krishna explains to
Arjuna, but it should not be resorted to lighdy. Indeed, Krishna and the Pandavas exhaust all
possibilities of compromise before they resolve to do battle. The use of force may not be altogether
avoidable in the face of multiple aggressions against India and Hinduism, but to rely on force as a
matter of long-term strategy to save India from its enemies would be contrary to Hindu ethics. It
would also be very unwise.

Pardy due to Gandhi's lingering influence, Hindus tend to overreact to the shiver in their own eye,
all while justifying or at least ignoring the beam in their enemy's eye. The mass killi ng of Hindus in
East Bengal in 1971 and the constant petty terrorizing of Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh to
chase them out have not moved Hindus in India to retaliate in any way; they never even talk about
it. By contrast, a single murder by a Hindu, that of Gandhi himself, was enough to throw the
Hindutva movement off course for decades. There is no dearth of Hindu soft -brains who feel guilty
for the Ayodhya demolition, and who preach that Hindus should make amends for it. A large-scale
killing or forcible expulsion of Muslims will expose Hindu society to the ferocious indignation of
the Muslim as well as the non-Muslim world, and experience shows that the Hindus have no
stomach for that. So, apart from being bad publicity, any major act of violence may also help to
paralyze a Hindu revival.

Leaving apart the influence of Gandhism, there are also honourable and purely Hindu reasons for
feeling uncomfortable with violent victories, viz. when violence was a wasteful and unnecessary
method resorted to out of being too lazy to try more subtle ways. As we shall demonstrate in the
last chapters, there is an excellent alternative. Gandhi's ahimsa failed because he did not wage the
ideological struggle (except to some extent against the British, with whom he also succeeded to an
extent). He could have thrown the Muslim League on the defensive if he had exposed the Islamic
ideology behind the League's separatism. He refused to do that, and if the Sangh continues to

follow in his footsteps on this issue, it will meet the same defeat. Whether by Gandhian
appeasement or occasional bursts of jihad-type violence, the Sangh is bound to lose the stmggle
against Islam. Its only chance lies in the ideological struggle, the royal highway to Ram Rajya.

[1] "Hindu-Muslim Tension: Its Cause and Cure", Young India, 29/5/1924; reproduced in M.K.
Gandhi: The Hindu-Muslim Unity, p.35-36.

[2] Unlike the day-to-day politicians in the BJP, the more clerical Sangh spokesmen in the VHP do
use proper Hindi, like hutatma or atmabalidan instead of shahid. Though terminology is not
important in itself, it is a good indicator of the speaker's level of understanding.

[3] I assume that if the RSS had accomplished anything during the Hindu flight from Pakistan, it
would have devoted a publication to celebrating its heroes and martyrs there.

8. The Sangh’s anti-
intellectualism

A very serious flaw which Gandhians and the Sangh have in common is their anti-intellectualism.
Though Gandhi reputedly rebuked RSS founder K.B. Hedgewar for not publishing any doctrinal
statements, i.e. for not giving any intellectual articulation to his nationalist movement, he essentially
shared Hedgewar's aversion for an intellectual job well done. Both of them made people march
many miles, both led their followers to make great sacrifices, and both failed to substantially raise
their followers' political understanding. They did not bother to educate them (and themselves) in
analyzing the character of the different forces in the field, all on the plea that "an ounce of practice
is worth more than a ton of theory".

Instead of developing an analysis and tracing the Hindu-Muslim conflict to its (Quranic) roots, they
chose to work on people's emotions. Gandhi practised emotional intimidation on the Hindus with
his ascetic gimmicks, but failed completely before the doctrinal wall of rejection which Islam had
erected against his "Hindu-Muslim unity". Gandhi's pleas for this interreligious unity were like the
attempt at air travel by a pre -modern person: without studying the laws of physics and applying
them through the appropriate technology, all he could achieve was to jump from a tower and fall to
his death. Calling for the tearing-down of the wall of hatred between Muslims and non -Muslims
without properly understanding its causes was an anti-rational endeavour doomed to bitter failure;
Gandhi merely banged his own head against the wall until his skull broke.

Gandhi's anti-intellectualism was evident in other fields too. He refused to make a proper study of
the history and doctrines of his own religion, replacing its complexity and richness with the
monolatry of a single booklet, the Bhagavad-Gita, which he also refused to study properly,
subjecting it to a dogmatic sentimental interpretation instead. Thus, Gandhi's reading of the Gita
(heavily influenced by the "Sermon on the Mount" aspect of Christianity) included the untenable
claim that the Gita teaches absolute non-violence. In reality, one of the Gita's main themes is
refuting the typically Gandhian anti-confrontationist arguments given by Arjuna in the first chapter.

Admittedly, Gandhi was not the first to twist Hindu scripture to suit his own pet theories, e.g.
Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhva managed to identify each his own version of Vedanta philosophy
as the "true" meaning of the Upanishads. But these acharyas applied their intellect and erudition to
make their point, while Gandhi haughtily rejected the importance of intellectual skills in discerning
the true meaning of a text, claiming that moral character was the decisive factor in correcdy
understanding scripture. He was wrong: people of bad character may understand scripture quite
well (an example from Hindu tradition is Ravana, a well-educated scoundrel), while people of good
character may not understand it at all (e.g. all those good people who are outside the civilizational
ambit of a given scriptural tradition). [1]

The result of Gandhi's anti-intellectualism was that he conducted his politics like a sleep-walker:
wilfully blind to the character of the forces he was dealing with. And since people, even very
ordinary people, cannot be satisfied for long with a diet of exalted emotions and counter -
commonsensical activism, his refusal to address the doctrinal aspect of certain political problems
(the Muslim challenge, the paradoxical situation created in Indian politics by World War 2, the
rising lure of Marxism) made people look for an ideological framework elsewhere. Gandhi's focus
on emotions was good for spectacular scenes of millions marching, but it failed to achieve the
political goals which these millions thought they were serving. The independence of a united India
never came, nor was truncated India in any sense a Ram Rajya or a realization of any ideal Gandhi
ever stood for.

The Communists, by contrast, worked on people's minds. They gave them (not just their card-
carrying foot soldiers but nearly the whole opinion-making and decision-making classes) a
framework with which to analyze political events and cultural trends. It is quite clear which
approach was more fruitful: soon after Marxism appeared on the Calcutta scene, it eclipsed the
Hindu Renaissance (when Sri Aurobindo retired from public life, people like Hedgewar failed to
take over his torch), and by the time Gandhi died, Gandhism as a genuine political movement had
been blown away by Marxism. For several decades after Independence, non-Communist politicians
implemented Communist policies, because they were mentally trapped in Marxist schemes of
analysis; by contrast, even nominally Gandhian politicians betrayed everything Gandhi ever stood
for (except Muslim appeasement, which Indian Marxists also promoted). In the long run, emotions
are inconsequential, and the Communists prospered and could make others implement their own
policies just by promoting their own thought.

Like Gandhi, the RSS and BJP cloak many of their campaigns and political demands in terms of
emotions, and this approach proves as futile as in Gandhi's case. Thus, a complaint about the lack
of national consciousness in the school curriculum is titled: "The education system does not
promote national sentiments". [2] Patriotic feelings develop naturally on the basis of a genuinely felt
common destiny, but in the case of many Muslims, this natural process is thwarted by the Islamic
ideas in which they are indoctrinated. So, the only way to "promote national sentiments" is a job of
intellectual persuasion: remove this doctrinal hurdle by helping Muslims to discover that the basic
doctrine of Islam is mistaken. If you are too lazy to study Islam and find out what is wrong with it,
all your efforts to "promote national sentiments" among youngsters brought up on a diet of anti-
Hindu teachings will prove futile.

The BJP's statements on Ayodhya are full of calls to "respect people's sentiments" (the tide of the
BJP brochure containing L.K. Advani's historic Lok Sabha speech on Ayodhya dd. 7 August
1989). [3] In general, sentiments should be respected, but not absolutely. Sometimes, hurting
sentiments is the inevitable and relatively unimportant consequence of a rightful and necessary act,
e.g. there is no doubt that imperialist Muslims felt hurt in their sentiments when the BJP supported
Hindu society's claim to Ayodhya, ignoring the Muslim community's cherished God-given right to
occupy other religions' sacred places. At any rate, sentiments cannot be the basis of a judicially
enforceable claim: thieves also develop a sentimental attachment to some of their stolen goods, yet

that doesn't give them a right to these goods. The Ayatollahs may have been genuinely hurt in their
sentiments by The Satanic Verses, but that gave them no right to kill its author or even to ban the
book. Even people who feel no sentimental attachment to the Rama Janmabhoomi site, such as
myself, can find that the site rightfully belongs to Hindu society alone, on impeccably objective and
unsentimental grounds. The appeal to sentiment is normally but the last resort of people who have
failed in defending their case on more serious juridical and historical grounds.

Gandhi's experiences should have taught the Sangh that emotionalism is powerless. So should its
own failures with this approach. For seventy years the RSS has been busy inculcating "patriotic
feelings", and this has not made an iota of difference in preventing the rise of separatism in Panjab,
Kashmir and the northeast. The result of this approach in the Ayodhya dispute should serve as an
eye-opener: the appeal to sentiment failed to win a single skeptic or secularist or Muslim over to the
Hindu position. Spreading knowledge is a far more powerful way of influencing public opinion than
these impotent attempts to promote certain emotions. Yet the Sangh Parivar has not adapted its
strategy, it simply repeats a strategy which is a proven failure. That brings us to another typically
Gandhian flaw in the Sangh: its stubborn refusal to learn from feedback.

A defining characteristic of all life forms is that, to a greater or lesser extent, they act upon
feedback: they adapt their behaviour in reaction to its observed effect. If you put your hand in
boiling water, you feel pain and immediately pull your hand back; by contrast, a stone falling into
this boiling water does not show the least inclination to pull back. Higher life forms even develop
feed-forward mechanisms: rather than first undergoing the effects of a certain behaviour before
adapting it, they are capable of foreseeing its effect and of either aborting or pursuing the intended
behaviour depending on the expected effect. Once you know enough about boiling water, you can
foresee the effect of putting your hand into it, and adapt your behaviour accordingly so as to handle
boiling water without letting it touch your skin. But dead entities do not have these capacities of
adapting to feed-back or feed-forward information. A glass falling from the table does not foresee
the effect and does not try to avoid it; even after having fallen to pieces and being glued together
again, it will still not do anything to avoid falling next time. Dead entities don't learn.

Going by this criterion, both Gandhi and the Sangh have always been quite dead. In the Khilafat
movement, Gandhi bent over backwards to please the Muslim leadership, he gave them a blank
cheque, yet they didn't show any gratitude or sympathy, but rather intensified their anti-national
commitments and their political separatism. His attempt to achieve Hindu-Muslim unity by means
of all-out appeasement was a dismal failure. Yet, he kept on repeating the same approach for
twenty-five years, and even after this had yielded Partition, he still kept on repeating it. There is no
indication that he ever did any introspection to correct this disastrous policy on the basis of the
feedback which he was receiving from reality 7 . Once he had embarked on this course, he simply
continued in the same orbit like any dead object in space subject to the law of inertia.

Similarly, the Sangh is not learning from its experiences. For example, to reassure its bonafide critics
(e.g. foreign journalists who are not part of the secularist coterie but have interiorized its
misinformation for lack of anything better) about the bogey of "Hindu fundamentalism", RSS and
BJP spokesmen always plead that "a Hindu state cannot be anti-secular, it is a contradiction in
terms" or that "Hinduism and theocracy cannot co-exist". [4] They have been saying this for decades

and keep on repeating it quite placidly, but to my knowledge, they have never ever checked whether
the message actually came across.

As labels go, it would not be unfair to describe the Arya Samaj as "Veda fundamentalists", or Swami
Karpatri and the Puri Shankaracharya as "Manuwadi fundamentalists", so India-watchers may have
a point when they do conceive of the notion of "Hindu fundamentalism". The RSS is certainly not a
fundamentalist movement, is definitely not working for a Scripture -based law system, but the
simplistic argumentation usually given, viz. that its being Hindu by itself excludes the possibility of
fundamentalism, is just not the right one. At any rate, nobody seems ever to have changed his mind
under the influence of this plea. The worst part of it is not that it fails to convince anyone, but that
the Hindutva spokesmen have never even bothered to register this fact, much less to draw any
practical conclusions from it.

[1] Gandhi's definition that "every good man is a Hindu" is a related example of Gandhi's
propensity to replace the intellectual subtleties inevitable in a proper definition of something as
complex as Hinduism with vulgar sentimentalism and simplistic moralism. It also happens to be
incorrect, e.g. Confucius was a good man but not a Hindu by any definition, while Ravana and
Duryodhana were Hindus by any definition even though they are remembered as incarnations of
evil.

[2] Organiser, 6/10/1996; emphasis added.

[3] Remark that the expression avoids the term "Hindu" (in contrast with Respect Hindu
sentiments, the subtitle of the VHP's "Hindu agenda" issued before the 1996 Lok Sabha election
campaign). In his The Concept of Hindu Nation (p.2), Abhas Chatterjee relates how a "prominent
political personage regarded by most people as a champion of Hindu Rashtra" (meaning L.K.
Advani) prohibited an enthusiastic audience from raising the slogan: "He alone will rule this country
who stands by the Hindu cause", and wanted the latter expression replaced with "the nation's
cause".

[4] Rama Jois: Supreme Court Judgment on 'Hindutva' (Suruchi Prakashan 1996), p.63.

9. The Sangh as dinosaur

The anti-intellectualism of the Sangh Parivar is a sufficiently serious problem to warrant a closer
discussion. The situation on the ground is that RSS men seldom sit down to do any thinking, but
are always on the move. As a US-based Hindutva activist told me: "When I make a phone call to an
RSS office-bearer in India, he will most often not be in the Delhi office, not in Nagpur or another
town, but somewhere on the way." And the wife of a BJP stalwart told me: "Being on the way from
one place to another is a status symbol among RSS men." With all this physical locomotion, little
time and occasion is left for concentrated mental work.

The Sangh has a basic commitment to India and to Hindu culture, but beyond that, its ideological
position is hazy and undeveloped, and therefore malleable in the hands of ideologically more
articulate forces. It has been more influenced by dominant political currents and intellectual
fashions, often emanating from its declared enemies, than one would expect from an "extremist"
movement. Like in the Congress and Janata parties, quarrels within the BJP are never about
ideology. As ex -insider Balraj Madhok writes in a comment on the Gujarat quarrels: "Personal
differences rather than ideological factors lie at the root of the rifts within the Sangh Parivar." [1]

To an extent, the BJP has its lack of ideological sophistication in common with all non-Communist
parties, most of all with Congress. A few recycled old slogans, a picture of its long-dead leaders,
some material presents for the voter (ad hoc food subsidies, writing off farmers' loans), and there
you have a complete Congress election campaign. Mutatis mutandis, the same is true for most
parties. The simple slogans on the outside are not the summary of a profound and complicated
programme too esoteric to trouble the voters with (as in the case of the Communists). The surface
is all there is to it, at least as far as ideology is concerned.

This ideological hollowness is merely the application to politics of a more general superficiality
afflicting India's public discourse. An example is the politics of Sikh identity: given the Vaishnava
contents of Sikh scripture and the unmistakable Hindu self-identification by Sikh leaders from Guru
Nanak through Guru Tegh Bahadur and Maharaja Ranjit Singh down to Master Tara Singh (a co-
founder of the VHP), the "separate identity" in which radical neo-Sikhs have invested so much,
including political separatism and a long decade of bloodshed, amounts to nothing more than
beards, turbans and steel bangles,— pure externality, an insult to the human intellect. [2]

Sri Aurobindo, the Freedom Fighter and philosopher, already said it: "I believe that the main cause
of India's weakness is not subjection, nor poverty, nor a lack of spirituality or Dharma, but a
diminution of thought-power, the spread of ignorance in the motherland of Knowledge.

Everywhere I see an inability or unwilingness to think — incapacity of thought or 'thought
phobia'." [3] The great ailment of India today is the decline in thinking power. The crudeness of
contemporary political thought in India, once the cradle of great pioneers in abstract and social
sciences, is a sad sight, especially considering that in other fields, such as business and the exact
sciences, Indians are already recovering their ancient greatness and showing their acumen again.

To this general atmosphere of intellectual sloppiness, the RSS has contributed its own wilful anti-
intellectual prejudice. The perception from which Dr. Keshav Baliram Hedgewar (RSS supremo
1925-40) started his RSS project was that Hindu society essentially had everything, even the best of
everything, certainly also in intellectual culture, and that the only thing it lacked was organization. It
is debatable whether lack of organization was a factor in the historical defeat of Hindu princes by
Muslim invaders and British colonizers, but for the interbellum period, this analysis possibly had its
merits. And so, the RSS put all its eggs in the single basket labelled Hindu sangathan/ "organization"
(hence its weekly's name Organiser).

Hedgewar's successor Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar (1940-73) despised intellectual pursuits, and
when he saw RSS people reading books or newspapers, he would ask them if they had "nothing
useful to do for the Sangh?" When I mention this to RSS activists, they protest that there are many
doctors, engineers and scientists in the RSS, and some of them recount as their personal experience
that Golwalkar had encouraged them in their studies. Alright then, let me rephrase my position as
follows.

Golwalkar, who had been trained as a biologist, shared with many people from the exact sciences a
dismissive incomprehension for the humanities, the disciplines in which critical thinking is
practised. Secondly, he shared with many spiritual-minded people a skepticism of the power of the
intellect as compared to that of supposedly deeper layers of consciousness. Thirdly, he shared with
many activists a distmst of sterile cerebration with its tendency to paralyze people's power to act.
And fourthly, he shared with many Hindus a disgust with the traitorous role of the Communists,
intellectuals all of them, in the British suppression of the 1942 Quit India movement and the
Partition of India. Hence the rhetorical question of many RSS people: "What good was ever done
by intellectuals?"

RSS people often tell the story of the Pandit who crosses the river and asks the boatman if he ever
studied philosophy: "No? Then half your life is wasted!" But when the boat starts to sink, it is the
boatman's turn: "Panditji, have you studied swimming? No? Then all your life is wasted!" And then
they have a good laugh, satisfied at having proven how useless intellectual effort is. But fact is: in
the modern world, the equivalent of "swimming" in the story, the skill necessary to disentangle
yourself from the impasse and reach the goal, is not the physical locomotion at which RSS officials
are so good. Among the skills needed for successful social and political action today, we should
include the art of collecting and analyzing information, and the art of formulating and advertising
viewpoints. Not the intellectuals, but the RSS itself acts like the pandit in the story who had spurned
mastering the art of swimming.

In fairness, it must be conceded that for all its anti-intellectual bias, through its dedicated
investment in grass-roots work involving enormous personal effort of several millions of people,
the Sangh Parivar has unmistakably succeeded in establishing an impressive presence among the
common people. Also, it must be said that some RSS leaders, particularly its new sar-sangh-chalak,
Prof. Rajendra Singh (1994—, successor of Balasaheb Deoras 1973-94), have understood the folly of

this anti-intellectual prejudice, and now exhort their workers to do some reading. The newer
publications are also less shabby-looking and better written than the handful of pamphlets which
constitutes the whole of RSS literature produced in the first seventy years. In particular, the
Organiser has definitely gained in informative reliability and intellectual depth under Seshadri
Chari's editorship. In the margin of Sangh, some local groups have started to process information
and disseminate ideas, such as the Vigil group in Chennai and the Hindu Vivek Kendra in Mumbai.
But the consequences of this long-standing policy of mindless activism are bound to mn their
course for some more years.

The Sangh's wilful mindlessness reminds me of a Chinese story about a man who equipped himself
for a journey to the south. He bought the best chariot and horses, hired the best charioteer, and
went to the imperial highway which crossed the empire in north-south direction. There, he gave
directions to his charioteer, and off they went. At a stop along the way, someone asked him where
he was going. "To the south", he said. "But this way you will never get there", said the stranger. The
man replied: "Come on, how can you say I will not get there? This is the best road in the empire,
why should it not take me there?" But the stranger said: "You will not get there, because you are
taking the direction to the north." The man insisted: "But these are the finest horses, and this is a
brand-new chariot, most certainly they will get me there." The stranger said: "But they will not get
you to the south if you take this direction." The traveller got tired of all this nit-picking: "My
charioteer is the best in the empire, so how can you say that he will not get me to my destination?
Look, this is a sterile discussion, I must be on my way." And off he drove, on the best road, with
the best equipment, at full speed, yet he never reached his destination.

Indeed, when you ask RSS office-bearers to evaluate their own performance, they will boast that
they have such a neat scheme of character-building, such a fine organization, so many well-trained
and dedicated cadres, such a wide range of activities and front groups. Alright, but where is this
impressive organizational machinery going? Do they know enough about Hinduism to understand
why it should be defended in the first place? The standard shakha teachings about "patriotism" may
fail to teach them much about the specific qualities of Hinduism. Do they know enough about
Hinduism's enemies to defeat or even simply to recognize them? Without a proper analysis, this
vast network of shakhas and front organizations is but an army of sleepwalkers.

I propose to conclude with another metaphor, which came up during a discussion I had with Dina
Nath Mishra, a journalist close to the RSS: "The RSS is a big dinosaur with a small brain." I don't
think I misrepresent Mishra's opinion when I say he agreed with this remark. His practical
conclusion was: the thing to do is not to build up an alternative organization, but to "infuse some
brain into the dinosaur".

[1] B. Madhok: "A Question of Power", Indian Express, 29 October 1995.

[2] The desire to fill up the doctrinal emptiness of non-Hindu neo-Sikhism has led to the superficial
adoption of British secular or Christian viewpoints (from anti-Brahminism to the Protestant
doctrinal slogan of "the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of men", quoted by Khushwant Singh
as the essence of Sikhism) and the redefining of Sikh concepts after an Islamic model, e.g. the ten

Gums as prophets, the Granth as "revealed scripture", the hukumnama as fatwa, the dharm yuddh
as jihad.

[3] Spoken in April 1920; quoted in Abhas Chatterjee: Concept of Hindu Nation, p.67.

10. Anti-intellectualism in action

The two most important consequences of the anti-intellectual prejudice animating the Sangh are,
firstly, an extreme ineptness at public relations, and secondly, the stunted development of the Sangh
Parivar's own intellectual grip on the world. An example of the first is the staggering failure of the
Hindu campaign reclaiming Ayodhya to communicate its case to the world, as already discussed.
The worst part of it is not that the Sangh people failed to communicate the Hindu case (the biased
press was indeed a formidable obstacle), but that it never took the trouble of verifying whether its
message came across nor of devising ways to deal with the hostile climate in the media and among
India-watchers.

Another example is riot reporting. Riots, though mostly started by Muslims (e.g. the Mumbai riots
of December 1992 and of January 1993), are systematically reported in the world media as
"pogroms" committed by well-prepared and well-armed Hindu death squads against poor
defenceless Muslims. In journalistic and scholarly references, Advani's peaceful 1 990 Rath Yatra has
become a proverbially violent "blood yatra". Unlike Asghar Ali Engineer and other riot vultures, the
Sangh does not bother to write its own reports on riots, in spite of its boast that its cadres are
omnipresent. Quite often, Sangh-related people tell me interesting and potentially explosive
background stories about riots (and other controversial matters such as discrimination of Hindus,
connivance at Bangladeshi infiltration etc.), but when I ask them for exact names, times, places, it
usually turns out that they have not bothered to record anything: what would have become a
credible-sounding propaganda story in the hands of A.A. Engineer remains a rumour headed for
oblivion in the hands of Sangh people.

The lie about "pogroms" is giving a bad name not only to the organized Hindutva forces, but to
Hindu society as a whole and to India as well; for that reason, the Sangh Parivar has no right to
neglect the public relations job inherent in any socio-political movement. Until a decade ago, most
observers and even enemies of Hinduism were prepared to concede to it a certain harmlessness and
benevolent tolerance as quintessentially Hindu qualities; today, even that lithe credit has been taken
away. Hindus used to take great pride in Swami Vivekananda's triumphal speech at the Parliament
of Religions in 1893, but the celebration of its 100th anniversary in Washington DC was just
embarrassing because the Ayodhya demolition was generally considered to have disproven
Vivekananda's description of Hinduism as tolerant. Hinduism is now never discussed without
mentioning the existence of "Hindu fundamentalism", at best to disclaim this phenomenon as part
of genuine Hinduism, but more often to prove that Hinduism is just as conducive to fanaticism as
Islam and Christianity are. The credit for this additional blot on the fair name of Hinduism must go
to the Sangh Parivar, not because it has taken up Hindu causes like Ayodhya, but because it has
handled them in such a mindless way.

We may compare this with the performance of the Bosnian Serbs, as contrasted with that of the
Bosnian Muslims. Without pronouncing an opinion on the rights and wrongs of the Yugoslav
conflict, we may notice a few pertinent facts about the strengths and weaknesses of the warring

parties. The Serb/Yugoslav army started in a very comfortable position, and easily established
control in up to 73% of the territory; the Muslim separatist government in Sarajevo found itself
defenceless after hopelessly overplaying its hand by declaring independence, but the Sarajevo
underworld provided the arms and expertise to save at least the capital and turn it into a base for
the reconquest of Bosnia. From that point onwards, the bragging drunkards on the Serb side
squandered their winning position step by step, while the sobre and determined Muslims made the
most of their limited strength.

A crucial factor in this war (admittedly more decisive in a small country than in India) was world
opinion. The Serbs squandered any goodwill they might have enjoyed, along with a lot of their
ammunition, in useless and ugly-looking actions against civilians and unimportant targets, e.g. by
bombing the museum city of Dubrovnik in a part of Croatia which they had no intention to
conquer. The Muslims, by contrast, fully exploited their underdog position in winning international
sympathy, and also hired the services of two American public-relations firms. We all know the
results: the American government willingly violated international agreements and its own laws by
helping Iran in shipping weapons and guerrilla fighters to Bosnia, the CIA trained Bosnian soldiers,
NATO air power destroyed the Serb frontline, the Bosnian army helped by the Croats reconquered
one-third of the Serb-held territory, and the Dayton agreement formally restored the political unity
of Bosnia, definitively refusing recognition to the Republika Srpska, all with the approval of
remainder-Yugoslavia. The Serbs lost the war exclusively by their mindlessness.

The most serious consequence of the Sangh's tradition of mindless activism is the second one, the
lack of a developed intellectual perspective on the Indian and world situations. In their political
analysis, Hindutva activists often use the categories developed by their enemies, and are the
prisoners of these categories. E.g., first they let their enemies lay down the norm of secularism, and
then they try to live up to this norm and prove that they are better secularists than others (hence
BJP "positive secularism" vs. Nehruvian "pseudo-secularism"). This way, they constantly have to
betray their own political identity and try to fashion themselves a new ("genuinely secular") identity
which their enemies have defined but are not willing to concede to them.

Sadly, this is common Hindu practice in the modern age. Thus, the Christian and Muslim emphasis
on monotheism and condemnation of polytheism has been interiorized by Hindu reform
movements even as the latter were trying to counter Christian power in India. Instead of defending
Hindu polytheism against the missionary vilification of "idolatry", the Brahmo Samaj and Arya
Samaj movements claimed that monotheism was indeed right and polytheism was indeed wrong,
but that Hinduism, properly understood, is more monotheist that Christianity and Islam. As the
historian Shrikant Talageri has remarked, this is as if an Indian were to say: "The colonial racists
were correct in assuming the superiority of white skins over brown skins, but Indians have whiter
skins than Europeans."

Such hopeless exercises in trying to defeat an opponent after first borrowing his thought categories
and value judgments, are understandable as a result of the inferior position in which Hindu society
has found itself for centuries, always trying to live up to standards set by their victorious enemies. In
an inertial hold-over of this psychology, today's Hindutva activists have an inferiority complex and

value nothing so much as being accepted by respected people, meaning secularists. That is why they
always offer their platforms to people who despise them, people like Inder Kumar Gujral and
Khushwant Singh (to name two whom I've seen scheduled as guests of honour at functions of the
RSS student organization Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad), at the same time spurning staunch
Hindus who ought to be their allies but who have been ostracized by the secularist establishment.

This approach is, of course, totally counterproductive, and if the Hindutva strategists had it in them
to learn from the feedback they get from reality, they would have given it up long ago and opted for
a bolder profile. That this would be more successful, was briefly illustrated at the height of the
Ayodhya controversy. Sensing that the public mood was in favour of the Hindu claim to the
disputed temple site, and more generally of some form of affirmation of India's Hindu identity, the
secularists temporarily borrowed the categories from their opponents and started preaching
secularism in the name of Hinduism: "True Hinduism doesn't fuss about mosques", "Rama himself
would not have approved of this quarrel over his temple", "Swami Vivekananda was a secularist
too", etc. Suddenly, the tables were turned, Hinduism had become respectable, just because in spite
of themselves, the Hindu leaders had been bold and defiant for once.

But the BJP leadership has definitely not learned from this experience. During the 1996 election
campaign, and during the 13-day tenure of the first-ever BJP Government, A.B. Vajpayee and other
BJP leaders were crawling before the secularist opinion masters and pleading that they were the
most secularist of all. It recalls the occasion in 1771 when the Peshwa general Mahadji Scindia,
militarily the most powerful man in India, prostrated before Moghul emperor Shah Alam whom he
had rescued from his Pathan rivals, instead of folding up the decrepit Moghul empire and declaring
Hindu Rashtra. The Hindutva forces, instead of seizing power in their own right and setting up an
avowedly Hindu dispensation, keep on crawling before people whom the Organiser bravely derides
as "forces of the past".

I expect Sangh spokesmen to reject this comparison with the argument that unlike Sindia's, the
Vajpayee government's power position was severely restricted, as it controlled only a minority in the
Lok Sabha. Fair enough: in the circumstances, the BJP had to tread carefully, and would have done
its duty by just remaining in power without rocking the boat, if only to break the hysteria about the
"threat of Hindu fundamentalism". But the point for now is that a review of past experience would
have taught Vajpayee that "more secular than thou" posturing had no chance at all of making any
dent in the secularist hate front against the BJP. Hindu society would accept concessions by a BJP
government, on condition that there was a realistic promise of obtaining certain real gains in return.
Only a fool could have believed that crawling before the secularists would yield any, but just any
reciprocal gesture. They are, after all, spoiled children, and the sight of beggars merely makes them
laugh. [1]

[1] Moreover, I cannot accept the explanation frequendy given by BJP men, that the BJP cannot do
anything until it comes to power at the centre. A party with a distinct ideological identity would
certainly give at least a foretaste of its future achievements through its parliamentary work and
through the performance of its state governments; but the record shows (cfr. infra) that the BJP has

performed as at most a second Congress Party, less corrupt at best, but hardly more alert to
specifically Hindu concerns.

11. ?f I am a Hindu communalist”

A symptom of the ideological power equation is the Sangh Parivar's permanent checkmate in the
"war of the words". The Sangh is at the mercy of the meanings which its enemies allot to important
terms, such as "communalism".

Originally (at least in Indian politics), "communal" was the term by which the British labelled
political arrangements, such as separate electorates and quota-based recruitment, which took the
religious community as the operative unit rather than the individual or the family or the region or
the nation. The term was never hurled at people who rejected these arrangements, but was quite
sincerely accepted by the people who proposed the "communalization" of the polity: the British and
the Muslim League advocated it openly, the Congress started defending it after becoming a party to
it through the Lucknow Pact (1916). When the British proposed the Communal Award, its
beneficiaries never thought of treating "communal" as a dirty word and throwing it at the
Communal Award's opponents. Today, by contrast, the mores of discourse have sunk to the level
where politicians and journalists and scholars systematically apply the term to a movement which
never used it as a description of its own positions.

Though Gandhi opposed the extension of the communal principle to the relations between caste
Hindus and untouchable Hindus, for the rest his whole negotiation policy with the League and the
British was situated within the framework of communalism. The main opposition to this
unapologetic communalism came not from the Congress, but from the Hindu Mahasabha with, in
its shadow, the fledgling Sangh. If you read speeches by HMS leaders in the 1930s and 40s, they
turn out to be full of unselfconscious attacks on "communal" politics. The Hindutva movement
was born in the struggle against communalism that was its very raison d'etre. The HMS's stated
programme was to abolish communalism and make India a secular democracy without separate
electorates and recruitment by communal quota. Congress, with its bad conscience about its
complicity in the communalization of the polity, tried to cloud the debate by misapplying the term
"communal" to the HMS on the analogy of the Muslim League. It falsely posited a symmetry
between the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha, smuggling out of the public's perception
the antisymmetry between the League's adherence and the HMS's opposition to the communal
principle. [1] Very quickly, accurate usage was eclipsed by muddled usage.

Today, the label "communal" is like a millstone around the Hindutva movement's neck. If the
Nehruvians who installed and still support a separate Personal Law for Muslims, a "communal"
arrangement par excellence, can get away with labelling their very opponents "communalists", we
have to admit that they have proven themselves past masters in the war of the words; it is no use
opposing them. The Sangh has lost this battle decades ago, but has never mustered the energy and
the brain power to even face its defeat squarely, much less to think up a way to turn the tables on
the Nehruvian Newspeak brigade. It merely tries to run away from the label with ridiculous
disclaimers ("Hindus can never be communal") which themselves presuppose the distorted meaning
imposed on this innocent word by the Nehruvians.

The best way out of this impasse is to accept the label and give it a new meaning. And I am not
proposing yet another distortion to counter the Nehruvian distortion, no, the new meaning should
simply be the word's true and original meaning. Before the British introduced "communal"
electorates and "communal" recruiting, the term had an entirely positive meaning. It has to do with
living together, with mutual support, with transcending petty divisions, with strengthening
community life, beautiful. [2] The Oxford Dictionary (1986 reprint) defines communal as "of or for
the or a community, for the common use". It also has an entry communalism, defined as "principle
of communal organization of society", and calls the Paris Commune a "communalistic government
in Paris in 1871". Indian journalists going abroad find to their initial disbelief that no one in the
West or anywhere else ever uses or even understands this swearword "communalist"; if asked for a
guess, few non-Indians would opine that the word might have a pejorative meaning. The magic
charm "communalism" which puts the whole Indian political scene in a mood of graveness and
militancy, and which can paralyze all normal thought processes in BJP circles, is nothing but a
provincial and distorted usage exclusive to India's English-speaking elite.

The Sangh people, after having been battered and beaten for decades on the words front, should
finally accept the challenge and hit back. Instead of swallowing this distorted meaning of the word
"communal" and trying to prove that it doesn't apply to themselves, they ought to accept the word
and reject the distortion. They should restore to the word its true meaning and then allot it to those
who are already stuck with it anyway — themselves. The only way to stop being chased around with
salvos of "communalists!" is to rename the BJP as Communalist Party. Every Hindu leader should
make it a point to tell interviewers: "I am a Hindu communalist." Wage the war of the words, and
win!

[1] This false symmetry is still propagated by the likes of Mani Shankar Aiyar, who once called the
BJP the "Hindu chapter of the Muslim League".

[2] Karl Marx tapped from the same source when he associated his own ideology of self-
righteousness and mass-murder with this string of community-related ideas through the term
communism. We should redeem the much-abused word family of community by reintroducing it
through a new derivative with a genuinely positive meaning.

12. Vulgar nationalism

A consequence of this lack of self-developed understanding of the forces in the field is that the
Sangh is not able to discern objective allies and enemies on the world stage, so that it is unable to
make friends. E.g., after liberalization and globalization became hot items, the Sangh Parivar
including the BJP has been multiplying and intensifying its attacks on the USA. Time and again,
Hindutva spokesmen have been presenting the impersonal process of globalization as an American
ploy to take over the world (just as Westerners once depicted earlier developments in capitalism as
Jewish conspiracies to dispossess the workers and smallholders). Much of their anti-Americanism
could have been borrowed quite literally from Leftist pamphlets of yesteryear, some of it also from
Ayatollah Khomeini's speeches; the only thing missing is the "Great Satan" label. Meanwhile, these
Hindutva exegetes of the globalization conspiracy have not even bothered to notice that in the USA
itself, globalization is being criticized both from the Left and the Right. This movement spurns its
potential friends.

A similarly misguided exercise consists in blaming first the British and now the Americans for
Hindu society's problems with Islam. Like the secularists, Hindutva authors systematically
exaggerate the British role in the Partition of India. The simple truth is that the British merely made
deals with an Islamic separatism which was very much there before their arrival, and which is
intrinsic to Islam. We can understand that the secularists refuse to face this fact, but in the case of
Hindutva spokesmen, this refusal smacks of cowardice.

Instead of blaming Islam for Pakistani aggression, a whole lot is made of the American arms which
Pakistan is using during this aggression; as if it is not the Pakistanis themselves who have chosen to
buy and use these weapons. Instead of focusing on ideological forces, the blame is put on a country;
in this respect, the creation of Pakistan comes in handy, because instead of blaming Muslim fellow-
countrymen for riots and bomb attacks and Kashmiri separatism, one can now blame "foreign
agents". And when Pakistan feels too close for comfort, the blame can be shifted to a more distant
country, like Britain or the USA. This demonization of a nation may be excusable in wartime fever
(though it is itself a major cause of wars), but it is definitely below the dignity of a columnist
commenting on world events from his armchair. Wherever we look in Sangh thinking, we
constandy run into this reduction of ideological problems to tribal conflicts between "national" and
"foreign" or "anti-national" forces. What is painfully missing is a keen eye for potentially friendly
trends across the borders, such as the increasing awareness in US foreign policy circles that India is
the West's natural ally against the anti-democratic regimes in Asia. [1]

Equally painful is the absence of any serious understanding about Communism, a key player on the
Indian and world stages during most of the Sangh's history. Communist critics of Hindutva take it
for granted that the Sangh is anti-Communist, but a perusal of Sangh publications does not support
this common belief. Thus, BJP economist Jay Dubashi, though formerly a staunch critic of Soviet
and Indian Communism, has actually blamed the CIA for the break-up of the Soviet Union, a
conspiracy theory which is highly unjust to the freedom-loving sections of the former Soviet

empire's population and incredibly unmindful of the self-inflicted economic breakdown which
forced the Soviet leaders into perestroika. [2] Any retrospective references to the Korea war, a UNO
mission to save South Korea from Communist aggression, routinely describe it as a case of
American aggression. Likewise, references to the Vietnam war ignore the fact that the Americans
merely intervened in an ongoing intra-Vietnamese war triggered by Communist aggression; it may
be true that the Americans misunderstood Vietnamese nationalism (a non-Communist factor of
opposition to the American intervention), but the fact that their motive was the containment of
Communism should not be overlooked.

All through the Cold War, the BJS/BJP never once developed a global vision of the Communist
problem. The only BJP publication on Communism, the 24-page pamphlet The Great Betrayers by
Krishna Lai Sharma (ca.1988), devoted to a critique of the Indian Communist Parties, merely points
out the Communists' extra-territorial loyalties and their "misunderstanding" of nationalism. Sharma
argues convincingly that the Communists do not accept Indian nationhood, and that whenever it
suits their purposes, they will twist nationalist discourse to promote "Bengali nationhood" or
"Keralite nationhood". Indian Communists are attacked for being "anti-national", which is a correct
allegation but hardly the whole story of what is wrong with Communism.

For anyone who has met victims of Communism, it is simply shocking to read what some
spokesmen of the (allegedly anti-Communist) Hindutva movement have to say about it. In the
spring of 1996, after the Cuban Army shot down two airplanes of Miami-based Cubans trying to
help Cuban boat refugees, and after China fired some shots in the direction of Taiwan in order to
intimidate the Taiwanese voters, Organiser columnist and former Illustrated Weekly of India editor
M.V. Kamath wrote the following: "The United States has a unique record of grave errors in the last
fifty years (...) It tried to prop up Chiang Kai-shek in Formosa and allotted the Chinese Permanent
Membership in the Security Council to his government. (...) It got into the Korean War and
sacrificed the lives of thousands of its young men in pursuit of a futile mission to contain
Communism. (...) The latest example is its support to Cuban terrorists making illegal flights over
Cuban air space, a brazen example of international lawlessness (...) But nothing fazes the United
States which seems determined to break any law, commit any crime for its own selfish ends." [3]

This outburst of crude and obnoxious anti-Americanism calls for some comment.

The American (in fact UNO) intervention in Korea was not a "futile attempt to contain
Communism". It was a rescue mission rendered necessary by Stalin's unilateral aggression against
South Korea, not by any interventionist whim of the USA; and it was relatively successful, in that it
achieved its stated goal of freeing South Korea and called a temporary halt to Communist
expansionism. [4] The alternative to saving South Korea would have been what India did to Tibet at
the very same time: when Mao's troops invaded, India treacherously refused help. Kamath, who is
hailed as a veteran journalist in the Sangh Parivar did not know or ignored the fact that in 1950
India had voted for the UN resolution for resisting Communist aggression in Korea and sent a
medical mission as India’s contribution to the Allied effort. Kamath calls American policy "selfish"
(ignoring that in the US, interventionism has always been criticized by isolationists who argue that
their country should be more selfish rather than help other countries out of trouble), but India's
policy vis-a-vis Communist aggression in Tibet was worse than selfish: rather than helping a friend

and buffer state, it preferred to damage its own interests by exposing its own borders to Mao's
armies. At the time, Nehru's despicable China policy was criticized by the Hindutva circles, but it
seems they have changed their minds.

Communist expansionism was at its peak, and if the American-led defence of South Korea had not
cooled Communist cockiness a bit, India would have been the next target (an armed Communist
uprising had already started in India in 1949). Without the rescue mission to Korea, and more
generally without the limitations clamped on the Communist powers by NATO vigilance, China
would not have retreated after its successful invasion of India in 1962, and most RSS men would
have breathed their last in Mao-cum-Namboodiripad's concentration camps. When China invaded
India in 1962, Communist expansionism was already hampered by Soviet-Chinese hostility; even
then, India had to turn to the USA for help.

The Chinese membership of the Security Council was not "allotted" to Chiang Kai-shek's Republic
of China (RoC) by whimsical Americans, as Kamath claims; the RoC held that seat by virtue of
being one of the victorious powers of World War 2 and a founding member of the UNO. As for
the free Cubans whose unarmed planes were shot down by Cuban Communists in international air
space when they were searching for boat refugees to help, it is simply disgusting that Kamath calls
them "terrorists". When RSS spokesmen themselves dole out this label so carelessly, why do they
complain when the RSS is blacklisted by the ill-informed security forces of some Western countries
as a "terrorist organization"?

Kamath ascribes American policies to the "white racist supremacists who make policy in
Washington". [5] He does not make clear how this profoundly sinister motive explains the
preference of American officials (some of whom are black) for brown Pakistanis over brown
Indians. Mr. Kamath's allegations are in no way different from those uttered in petty Leftist
pamphlets. Those who were under the impression that the RSS counted itself among the anti-
Communist forces, should realize that without too much exaggeration, RSS’ anti-Communism can
fairly be described as a notion invented by the Communists themselves.

How can an otherwise capable intellectual like Mr. Kamath stoop to this vulgar demonization of a
foreign country? Mindless "patriotism", known to be the refuge of scoundrels, reduces complex
issues to a question of "national" versus "foreign", rather than analyzing the ideological forces in the
field. Pretending that problems are essentially non-existent (e.g. Hindu-Muslim hostility), or
otherwise at least very simple (viz. due to the evil foreign hand): that has become the focus of
Hindutva casuistry.

Though the BJS used to support the RoC on Taiwan against Communist China, the state with the
Laogai slave labour camps, now M.V. Kamath in Organiser supports China's right to take Taiwan
by force. To him, this is merely a matter of "national unity" and thwarting "American designs" to
keep China divided, as if he had never heard of the intra-Chinese civil war between opposing
ideologies which has created the present division of China (the only American crime in this intra-
Chinese conflict was that at the critical moment, military aid to Chiang Kai-shek's legitimate
Government was cut off). [6] Kamath's hateful jibes against the RoC are representative of a

tendency within the BJP which concedes Beijing's right to annex Taiwan, the last toehold of the
legitimate RoC, by force. [7] Here, the BJP has thrown all considerations of principle overboard, and
settled for Realpolitik vis-a-vis big China and lithe Taiwan.

Or rather, it is worse than Realpolitik, it is the product of a grave political aberration. Any
ideological consideration seems to have been discarded in favour of a monomaniacal concern for
"national unity": better the whole of China under Communist rule than to allow a foothold to the
freedom-loving Chinese at the price of a temporary division. The Sangh simply refuses to study the
problem of Communism except in terms of the Indian Communists' extraterritorial loyalties. This is
a very crude and narrow-minded type of nationalism. One wonders why the Sangh rejects the
Jamaat-I-Islami’s offer of a United India under Islam.

[1] It is a different matter that many Hindutva spokesmen fantasize aloud about a clash of
civilizations between Islam and the West, in which they expect the West will take care of Islam and
relieve the Hindus from the burden of facing Islam themselves.

[2] Jay Dubashi: "We don't need foreigners to destroy us", Organiser, 18/2/1996.

[3] M.V. Kamath: "A Myopic Policy", Organiser, 14 April 1996; emphasis added. Remark that while
the US never committed any massacre of Hindus, and while Islam has kill ed millions of Hindus,
Kamath nor the Organiser have ever used such strong language about Islam.

[4] As any student of history could tell the BJP "anti-Communists", the only mistake which
President Truman made, was that he did not allow General Douglas Me Arthur to bomb the bases
and supply lines of the Chinese "volunteers", in which case the UNO forces might have completed
their success by securing the liberation of Communist-occupied North Korea.

[5] M.V. Kamath: "The US threat to India", Organiser, 19 May 1996. One wonders how the so-
called "angry white males" would feel about this, the people in the US who feel that their federal
government is, on the contrary, biased against whites.

[6] M.V. Kamath: "The Question of Taiwan", Organiser, 7 April 1996.

[7] Though I have not found this confirmed in an official BJP document, this acceptance of
Communist China's right to annex the Republic of China is also the BJP's position, according to
two members of the BJP's Foreign Policy Cell.

13. Hindutva and other peoples’
nationalism

The BJP's subordination of any and every ideological or religious conflict to questions of "national
unity and integrity", this most mindless form of territorial nationalism, is also a worrying retreat
from the historical Hindu conception of Indian nationhood and its implications for the evaluation
of foreign problems of national unity. Along with Mahatma Gandhi and other Freedom Fighters,
the BJS used to be convinced that India was a self-conscious civilizational unit since several
thousands of years, strengthened in its realization of unity by the Sanskrit language, the Brahmin
caste, the pilgrimage cycles which brought pilgrims from every part of India all around the country
("country" rather than the "Subcontinent" or "South Asia", terms which intrinsically question this
unity), and other socio-cultural factors of national integration. The notions that India was an
artificial creation of the British and a "nation in the making", were floated by the British themselves
and by Jawaharlal Nehm, respectively, and both are obvious cases of unfounded self-flattery.
Gandhi's and the BJS's viewpoint that India is an ancient nation conscious of its own unity is
historically more accurate.

In foreign policy, one can expect two opposite attitudes to follow from these two conceptions of
India, the Gandhian one which derives India's political unity from a pre-existent cultural unity, and
the Nehruvian one which denies this cultural unity and sees political unity as a baseless coincidence,
an artificial creation of external historical forces. In its own self-interest, an artificially created state
devoid of underlying legitimacy tends to support any and every other state, regardless of whether
that state is the political embodiment of a popular will or a cultural coherence. The reason is that
any successful separatism at the expense of a fellow artificial state is a threat to the state's own
legitimacy. That is, for instance, why the founding member states of the Organization of African
Unity decided from the outset that the ethnically absurd colonial borders were not to be altered. It
is also why countries like Great Britain and France, whose own legitimacy within their present
borders is questioned by their Irish, Corsican and other minorities, were reluctant to give diplomatic
recognition to Lithuania when it broke away from the Soviet Union.

By contrast, those who believe that states are merely political instruments in the service of existing
ethnic or cultural units, accept that state structures and borders are not sacrosanct in themselves,
and that they may consequently be altered. That is why Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn proposed to allow
the non-Slavic republics to leave the Soviet Union, and why as a sterling Russian patriot he pleaded
in favour of Chechen independence from the Russian Federation: it is no use trying to keep Turks
and Slavs, or Chechens and Russians, under one roof against their will. If Russia is meant to be the
political expression of the collective will of the Russian people, it is only harmful to include other
nations by force, as the Chechens and Turkic peoples once were.

To be sure, even partisans of this concept of "meaningful" (as opposed to arbitrary) states will

concede that there may be limitations to this project of adjusting state structures and state borders
to existing ethnic and cultural realities, especially where coherent communities have been ripped
apart and relocated, as has happened in Russia. Also, cultural and ethnic identities are not static
givens (e.g. the "Muslim" character of India's principal minority), so we should not oversimplify the
question to an idyllic picture of a permanent division of the world in states allotted to God-given
national entities. But at least the general principle can be accepted: states should as much as possible
be the embodiment of coherent cultural units. That, at any rate, is the Hindu-nationalist
understanding of the Indian state: as the political embodiment of Hindu civilization.

Now, what is the position of the BJS/BJP regarding the right of a state to self-preservation as
against the aspirations of ethnic-cultural communities or nations? The BJS originally had no
problem supporting separatism in certain specific cases, esp. the liberation of East Turkestan
(Sinkiang/Xinjiang), Inner Mongolia and Tibet from Chinese rule. At the time, the BJS still adhered
to the Gandhian position: India should be one independent state because it is one culturally, and so
should Tibet for the same reason. Meanwhile, however, this plank in its platform has been quiedy
withdrawn.

As A.B. Vajpayee told the Chinese when he was Janata Party Foreign Minister, and as Brijesh
Mishra, head of the BJP's Foreign Policy Cell, reconfirmed to me (February 1996): India, including
the BJP, considers Tibet and other ethnic territories in the People's Republic as inalienable parts of
China. [1] The BJP has decisively shifted towards the Nehruvian position: every state, by virtue of its
very existence, must be defended against separatist tendencies, no matter how well-founded the
latter may be in cultural, ethnic or historical respects. That is, for example, why the BJP is not
supporting Kurdish sovereignty against Iraqi and Turkish imperialism. [2] Along with falling from
cultural Hindu nationalism to empty secular-territorial nationalism, the BJP has also fallen from
solidarity with other oppressed and colonized nations to a short-sighted Indocentrism.

When you ask why the BJP has abandoned its support for the Tibetan freedom movement, the
standard reply is that this would justify other separatisms, including those in Kashmir and Panjab.
Exactly the same position is taken by non-BJP politicians and diplomats. But from a Hindu and
from an Indian nationalist viewpoint, this position does injustice to India's claim on Kashmir and
Panjab, which should not be put on a par with all other anti-separatism positions in the world.
Firstly, while Tibet was never a part of China, and while Chechnya was only recently (19th century)
forcibly annexed to Russia, Kashmir and Panjab have been part of the heartland of Hindu culture
since at least 5,000 years. Secondly, in contrast with the annexations of Chechnya and Tibet, the
accession of Punjab (including the nominally independent princedoms in it) and the whole of the
former princedom of Jammu & Kashmir to the Republic of India were entirely legal, following
procedures duly agreed upon by the parties concerned.

Therefore, Indian nationalists are harming their own case by equating Kashmiri separatism with
independentism in Tibet, which did not accede to China of its own free will and following due
procedure, and which was not historically a part of China. To equate Kashmir with Tibet or
Chechnya is to deny the profound historical and cultural Indianness of Kashmir, and to undermine

India's case against Kashmiri separatism. Here again, we see the harmful effect of the BJP's
intellectual sloppiness.

To be fair, we should mention that the party considers its own compromising position on Tibet as
very clever and statesmanlike: now that it is preparing itself for Government, it is now already
removing any obstacles in the way of its acceptance by China and the USA (who would both be
irritated with the "destabilizing" impact of a Government in Delhi which is serious about
challenging Beijing's annexation of Tibet). In reality, a clever statesman would reason the other way
around: possibly there is no realistic scope for support to Tibetan independence, but then that can
be conceded at the negotiation table, in exchange for real Chinese concessions, quid pro quo. [3] If
you swallow your own hard positions beforehand, you will have nothing left to bargain with when
you want to extract concessions on the other party's hard positions, i.e., China's territorial claims on
Ladakh, Sikkim and Amnachal Pradesh, and its support to Burmese claims on the Andaman and
Nicobar islands. International diplomacy should teach the BJP what it refuses to learn from its
Indian experiences, viz. that being eager to please your enemies doesn't pay.

[1] If earlier BJP manifestoes still mentioned Sino-Indian cooperation "with due safeguards for
Tibet", meaningless enough, the 1996 manifesto does not even mention Tibet. Nor does it
unambiguously reclaim the China-occupied Indian territories; it vaguely setdes for "resolving] the
border question in a fair and equitable manner ".(p. 32)

[2] In October 1996, a handful of BJP men bravely demonstrated before the American Embassy
against the American retaliation to the Iraqi troops' entry in the Kurdish zone from which it was
barred by the UNO. There was every reason to demonstrate: while punishing Iraq, the Americans
allow Turkish aggression against Iraqi Kurdistan, the so-called "protected" zone, and fail to support
Kurdish independence in deference to Turkey's objections. But that was not the target of the BJP
protest, which merely opposed any and every threat against the "unity and integrity" of Iraq, a
totally artificial state with artificial and unjustifiable borders (as Saddam Hussain himself argued
during the Gulf War, pointing to the artificial British-imposed border between the Mesopotamian
population centre and the Kuwaiti oil fields).

[3] This is not to suggest that demanding freedom for Tibet should only be done to have bargaining
chip, merely to illustrate the principle that concessions, even if unavoidable under the
circumstances, should still be made known as such, i.e. in exchange for concessions from the other
party, and not made beforehand in exchange for nothing. But Beijing politics may develop in such a
way that Tibetan sovereignty becomes a realistic proposition again.

14. The Sangh’ s Muslims

In criticizing the Sangh's simplistic anti-Americanism, I am not holding a brief for American foreign
policy. The Organiser is entirely right in arguing that American officials are being extremely silly
when they base their policies on the assumption that Pakistan is a bulwark against (rather than of)
Islamic fundamentalism. But this mistake is hardly typically American: in Organiser itself,
columnists play the same game of labelling Muslim entities, without asking their consent, as
bulwarks against Islamic fanaticism.

Ever since he counselled Muslims to abandon their claim to the Ayodhya site, one Maulana
Wahiduddin Khan is regularly presented in Organiser as an enlightened alternative to Islamic
fanaticism. [1] He is also credited with admitting that most riots are started by Muslims. Yet,
Wahiduddin Khan is an ideologue and leader of the Tabligh movement, the object of which is to
"purify" Muslim culture of Hindu influence. [2] It is motivated by the same hostility to Hinduism as
the Muslim League's Pakistan movement was. His endorsement of the Hindu claim on Ayodhya
springs from the realization that the Muslim campaign for the islamization of the disputed site in
Ayodhya (in use as a Hindu temple since 1 949) has proven harmful to Muslim interests. Similarly,
his chastising the Muslims for starting riots can perfectly be explained by the bad image which this
gives them among Hindus, who are not fooled by the secularist lies about "pogroms", and are kept
on the alert against Muslims. But the RSS, in its eagerness to find some kind of approval in the
enemy camp, wilfully ignores the fundamental hostility of a Wahiduddin Khan (and of many others
whom they welcome on Hindutva platforms), just like the US Government ignores the intense anti-
Americanism and Islamic mi li tantism in Pakistan.

Similarly, the enthusiasm in Sangh circles for Ansar Hussain Khan, a second Muslim who actually
talks with Sangh people and thereby breaks through the cordon sanitaire which the secularists have
laid around the Hindutva movement (assuring him of intense gratitude in Sangh circles), shows a
painful lack of viveka/ discrimination. I have nothing against the man personally, and from his
acclaimed book The Rediscovery of India I get the impression that he is sincerely seeking an exit
from the Islamic worldview; only, he has not yet freed himself from certain basic attachments to
things Islamic. [3] I know from experience that outgrowing a closed creed like Christianity or Islam
is usually done in stages (e.g. there are millions of people in Europe who have rejected their Church
but not yet Christ), so I will not hold it against him that he hasn't reached the stage of full
emancipation yet. I also appreciate the courage it must take for a Muslim secularist to write in
positive terms about the Sangh. But if we limit our evaluation to the actual ideas formulated by
Ansar Hussein Khan, we find certain things which are just unacceptable.

First of all, he builds up the well-known argument that the crimes which Islam has committed in
India are violations of the true spirit and the true law of Islam. This is the great illusion which most
modern Hindus cherish: the true Islam as conceived by the founder is impeccable, the only problem
is that some followers misunderstood him, or that purely nominal Muslims with lithe interest in the
true Quranic message falsely used the label "Islam" as justification for their un-Islamic selfish acts.

Even among known Hindu critics of Islam, if you scratch the surface, something of that illusion has
withstood their best scholarly insights. [4] I suggest Hindutva ideologues start to live up to the image
which the secularists have propagated about them, viz. that they are anti-Islamic. Unfortunately,
though a good many of them are anti-Muslim at heart, most of them are not anti-Islamic at all.

The second and most dangerous message in A.H. Khan's book is his plea for undoing the Partition,
reminding us of similar pleas by K.R. Malkani and other Sangh stalwarts. True, India should not
have been partitioned, the Hindu masses were right to vote for a party which promised to prevent
Partition (unfortunately, that party, the Congress, was deliberately fooling the voters), the Hindu
organizations were right to campaign against it. But history moves in strange ways, and yesterday's
disaster may be today's blessing. For Hinduism as such, Partition has by now proved to be a
blessing in disguise, a last chance to survive. When you consider that before Independence, the
Hindu Congress stalwarts were taken for a ride by the determined Muslim leadership though the
Muslims represented less than one-fourth of the population and there were practically no Islamic
states to support them, how would the Hindus fare in a united India in which the Muslims now
constitute one-third of the population and receive support from rich and well-armed Islamic states?

The last offers made to Jinnah to make him abandon his Partition plans included 50% reservations
for Muslims at all levels and an effective predominance of the Muslims in the government. What
Jinnah gave up by refusing the offer was a Muslim- dominated Akhand Bharat, an unassailable
country with the highest population in the world, with "Vedanta brain and Muslim body" (freely
after Vivekananda): Hindu brains to serve the progressively islamicizing regime by building satellites
and nuclear bombs, and Muslim muscle to push back the Hindu element until it would vanish the
way it is actually vanishing from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Possibly this would have led to a civil
war, but it is by no means certain that Hindus would have won. Hindus were just not ready for
Akhand Bharat, because they were not ready with Islam.

The present Indian state is already difficult for Hindus to manage; apart from the Demolition
(responsibility not acknowledged) and a few Supreme Court verdicts (no merit of politicians), the
Hindutva forces have suffered defeat upon defeat in their struggle with the secularists and Islam,
essentially because they have never resolved to wage war against the Islamic-cum-secularist forces
which are already waging an all-out war against Hinduism. They failed to enact an effective ban on
cow-slaughter, to enact effective curbs on missionary subversion, to integrate Kashmir, to stop the
1991 Places of Worship Act, to withhold statutory status from the Minorities Commission, to stop
(let alone reverse) Bangladeshi infiltration.

In this light, all the Hindutva daydreaming of a pan-Subcontinental federation (whence the cordial
welcome to A.H. Khan) is profoundly mistaken. It amounts to saying: "Now that we have proven
ourselves unable to handle small problems, give us big problems to let us handle those." It is no
coincidence that all Muslim intellectuals now openly deplore Partition: they now realize that Indian
Islam lost on Partition, and that it is quite capable of taking control of the whole Subcontinent.

They have given up believing their own lies about the RSS being a formidable fighting force
threatening the Muslims, they know very well that Hindu society under its present "leadership" is no
match for determined Islamic gangsterism. They even think that the RSS can serve their ends:

bringing down the one defence which stands between Islam and the annihilation of Hinduism, viz.
the Indian state. For all its Muslim appeasement and anti-Hindu discriminations (cfr. infra), the
Indian state is not aggressively anti-Hindu: the Hindu-born ruling class may sell itself for petro-
dollars, but it does not organize the kind of oppression which exists in Pakistan. It does not support
Hinduism, but at least it passively allows Hindu culture to flourish on its own strength. Most
importantly, the Indian police and armed forces (unlike those in the Akhand Bharat which Jinnah
spurned) are predominantly Hindu, and they are not passive bystanders when Muslims terrorize
Hindus, as they are in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Partition has been a mistake, from the Islamic viewpoint. The Muslim community has been split
into three roughly equal parts; Pakistan and Bangladesh are uninspiring backwaters; the Muslims in
the more promising state of India cannot entirely free themselves of the Partition stigma, and will
be unable to take power there for at least another half century. It is now clear that from the
viewpoint of Islamic interests, the pro-Partition Aligarh school was wrong and the anti -Partition
Deoband school was right: Islam in India should not have settled for a part of the country, but
should have aimed for control of the whole country. The plan is that Pakistan and Bangladesh
remain Islamic states, but India should become a joint account. In Bangladesh the idea is very
popular because it would formalize the de facto permeability of the Indian border for Bangladeshi
migrants.

Short, Akhand Bharat is now high on the Islamic agenda, and calculating Muslims are welcoming
and encouraging RSS romantic daydreaming about reunification. But so far, I have not seen any
Sangh spokesman pause and wonder why Islamic strategists have suddenly joined them in wanting
to undo the Partition. They see no reason for suspicion.

A similar case of unjustified lack of suspicion seems to be moving up on the BJP's and India's
political agenda: proposals to change the electoral system, including the replacement of the first-
past-the-post system with a proportional system. This system, which functions well in the
Netherlands and Israel (and in diluted form in most European countries), would be an unwise
choice for India, because it would allow Islamist parties to enter the parliaments, not just from
Muslim-majority districts but from wherever the Muslim vote is worth a seat. This would then force
secular parties to compete with the Muslim League for the Muslim vote, which they will do by
promising ever-greater concessions to Islam. The effect will be similar to the creation of separate
electorates in the pre -independence period. At the time of writing, I am not aware of a definitive
consensus about this in the BJP, but not of a realization of the danger either. [5] The BJP used to
support the proportional system which favours smaller parties when it was a small party itself, but
now that it is a large party, it may avert the danger out of sheer self-interest.

As for undoing the Partition, it is true that India should ultimately be reunited, but which India?
What do the Sangh people expect to achieve by undoing Partition without undoing the doctrinal
conditioning which led to Partition in the first place? Do they prefer an Islamic Akhand Bharat to a
partitioned India which allows Hinduism to survive in its major part? Have they given any thought
to the probable outcome of their policies? In their case, that is always the question.

Unfortunately, Sangh Parivar ideologues labour under the illusion that they can leave Islam intact
while removing the "anti-national" element from it. Most of them, even including the fairly radical
former BJS president Balraj Madhok, have suggested that the Islam problem can be solved by
"indianization": Islam has to "indianize" itself. Or as the Organiser once put it: "Let Muslims look
upon Ram as their hero and the communal problems will be all over. "[6] Islam, however, is a
seamless garment, and it cannot be freed from its anti-Hindu doctrine while retaining its Allah and
Mohammed. Muslims cannot look upon Rama as "their" hero without ceasing to be Muslims.

The term "indianization" implies that the problem with Islam is its un-Indianness. And this, in turn,
would imply a nationalistically distorted view of religion: that a nation should only follow native
traditions and shun foreign contributions in religion. By such standards, the adoption of Hinduism
or Buddhism by the peoples of East and Southeast Asia would not be a matter of pride (as it seems
to be for the Sangh) but a violation of the proper world order. The Khmers should have rejected
Shiva and built their Angkor temple to some native deity; the Balinese should not enact the
Ramayana but create an epic around a native hero instead. The "holyland" of many East-Asian
Buddhists is not their own country, but India: the Mahabodhi temple was renovated in the 19th
century by the king of Burma, and is now surrounded by guest-houses catering to many thousands
of pilgrims from each Buddhist country every year. Should we deduce that these Thai or Japanese
pilgrims are being "anti-national" by having such "extra-territorial" religious loyalty? And that the
Mongolian and Chinese Communists were right to crack down on Buddhism? That would be the
implication if we start reducing religions to their geographical provenance instead of studying their
contents. In this case, patriotism is not the refuge of scoundrels, but of duffers.

This futile attempt to identify the Islam problem in terms of "Indian" vs. "foreign" implies a second
similarity with certain undesirable xenophobic trends in the West. Semi-literate xenophobic
ideologues in Europe identify Islam as "a foreign religion, fit for Asiatics but not for Europe". In
their opinion, there is nothing wrong with Islam, as long as it remains in its country of origin. This
is not too different from the applause given in Hindutva publications to Anwar Shaykh's thesis that
"Islam is the Arab national movement". In his book Islam, the Arab National Movement, the
Pakistan-born apostate author from Cardiff (with a death-warrant fatwa on his head since 1994)
accurately documents how islamization has meant external arabization (names, clothes, script) for
most converted populations, but wrongly infers that Islam is a form of Arab nationalism or Arab
imperialism.

For the Sangh, this thesis was doubly welcome: it recast the Islam problem in the familiar, safely
secular-sounding terms of nationalism, and it legitimized Islam ("See we're not against Islam?") all
while limiting its legitimate geographical domain so as to exclude India from it. The implication is
that Hinduism is Indian nationalism, and Islam is Arab nationalism. This is grossly unjust to the
Arabs and the native Arab culture which Islam destroyed. There is nothing Arab about Islam, a
doctrine confabulated by Mohammed from half-digested bits and pieces of Jewish and Christian
lore, combined with his own extraordinary self-image and the hallucinations registered on his
sensory nerves (the Quranic voice he "heard"). Except for a small minority of people attracted to
Mohammed out of gullibility or lust for booty and power, the Arabs were only forced under the
yoke of Islam after valiantly resisting it. For the sake of comparison, Communism was not the

"Chinese national movement" just because Chairman Mao's Communists militarily wrested the
country from the legitimate Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai-shek. The genuine Arab
national movement was the so-called Ridda ("return" to god-pluralism) uprising against the Islamic
state after Mohammed's death, in which the Arabs tried to restore their pluralistic culture. [7]

The review of Anwar Shaykh's work in Organiser was titled "Muslim proud of his Aryan heritage".
This was, first of all, an untruthful statement. It is true that Anwar Shaykh has rediscovered the
"Aryan" (i.e. Vedic) heritage which his great-grandfather had abandoned by converting to Islam. [8]
But the consequence of this rediscovery was precisely the opposite of what the Organiser title
suggests: he quit Islam, becoming a "non-Muslim proud of his Aryan heritage". Secondly, this title
sent the wrong message to Indian Muslims. The message which Organiser sought to convey was
that Indian Muslims should follow Anwar Shaykh's example: remain Muslim all while rediscovering
their Aryan heritage (or with an older term, "indianizing" themselves). This was a replay of the
Gandhian myth of the "nationalist Muslim" for whom Islam and Indianness are not
incompatible. [9] But the case of Anwar Shaykh proved just the opposite: by rediscovering his
Hindu heritage, a Muslim loses his Muslim identity. Islamic fanatics are wholly aware of this
phenomenon, which is why they try to nip it in the bud, e.g. by forbidding Hindu religious music on
Pakistani radio. The message of the Organiser should have been: "Indian Muslims, follow Anwar
Shaykh's example, rediscover your Vedic heritage, and abandon Islam."

A similar case is that of BJP office-bearer Sikander Bakht. Mr. Bakht is a thorough gentleman, but
his main value for the BJP is that he is a born Muslim. He is often shown off as the party's token
Muslim, but just as often, angry Muslims write letters to the editor to explain that Mr. Bakht is not a
Muslim at all. They say that he actually converted to Hinduism on the occasion of his marriage to a
Hindu lady, and that his children were raised as Hindus. Now, when I am to choose between the
BJP version and the Muslim version, I tend to attribute more credibility to the latter. If it is true that
Mr. Bakht is a convert, I certainly applaud the BJP policy of giving due prominence to him. Only,
they should have the sincerity and the wisdom to add the correct message, which is not: "We have
Muslims as well", but: "We welcome Indian Muslims seeking the way out of Islam back into their
ancestral culture."

[1] Cfr. Maulana Wahiduddin Khan: Indian Muslims. The Need for a Positive Outlook (Al-Risala
Books, Delhi 1994), p.109-130. Within the limitations of the Muslim outlook, this is nonetheless a
lucid and well-intended book.

[2] Cfr. Maulana Wahiduddin Khan: Tabligh Movement, Islamic Centre, Delhi 1986.

[3] Ansar Hussein Khan: The Rediscovery of India. A New Subcontinent, Orient Longman, Delhi
1995. The book is well-written; particularly pleasant to read is the candid deconstruction of the
entire Congress version of the Freedom Struggle and the Partition machinations, which cuts secular
icon Jawaharlal Nehru to size. The book also contains in appendix the correspondence between
Khan and the BJP leadership.

[4] E.g., in 1993 a leading historian signed a petition against Syed Shahabuddin's attempt to get Ram
Swarup's book Hindu View of Christianity and Islam banned, but not after suggesting a change in

the text: instead of the phrase which refuses to Shahabuddin the role of "conscience-keeper of the
nation", he wanted to put "conscience-keeper of Islam". The implication was that Islam is alright,
but that Shahabuddin distorts Islam.

[5] In its 1996 Election Manifesto (p.ll), the BJP promises to "examine the feasibility of
introducing the list system", which would imply multi-seat constituencies giving a more
proportional representation to smaller parties. Incidentally, political experience in Belgium and
other countries using a list system shows that it strengthen the control of the parties over the
candidates, which may (as Euroskeptic defenders of the British first-past-the-post system righdy
argue) be questionable from the viewpoint of democracy.

[6] Organiser, 20/ 6/1971, quoted in Tapan Basu et al.: Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flags, p.12.

[7] Even A. A. Engineer (The Origin and Development of Islam, Orient Longman, Delhi 1987, 2nd
ed., p.131) admits that "the war of ridda (apostasy) was a general insurrection throughout Arabia".

[8] The story is told in Anwar Shaykh: Eternity (Principality Publishers, Cardiff 1 990) and in various
issues of his quarterly Liberty.

[9] Of course, it can and does happen that an Indian Muslim has genuine patriotic feelings, but this
is necessarily in spite and at the detriment of his commitment to Islam. Many Indian Muslims are
not "Pakistani patriots", firstly because Pakistan is mistreating their own Mohajir cousins, and
secondly because Pakistan is a failure in every secular respect except terrorism. Their dream of an
Indian-Muslim state is no match for the reality that unlike Pakistan, India is a country to be proud
of. In that sense, I am willing to accept the self-description of people like M.J. Akbar as "nationalist
Muslims". But they remain stuck with a problem of divided loyalties, and part of the reason why
they have accepted their Indianness is that the present Republic is in many ways an incarnation of
their second (Islamic) loyalty as well: a pro-Muslim regime dedicated to weakening Hinduism.

15. A party of shopkeepers

The BJP eagerly wants to be friends with everyone who counts as respectable. The best predictor of
their positions in upcoming political issues is: what will the opinion-making establishment say?
When new fads appear on the public scene, whether it is the Ambedkar cult or reservations for
women in Parliament, the BJP is sure to pick them up in due course. [1] Instead of radicalism, the
record of its manifestoes, resolutions, interventions in parliament, and public statements, shows a
goody-goody approach to all the forces which are animated by a declared and unyielding hatred of
the BJP. This may have something to do with the party's castewise roots.

It is often alleged that the BJP is an upper-caste party out to preserve the privileges of the upper
castes. The grain of truth in this is that the BJP, like the Congress and the Communist Party, was
founded by Brahmins. But like these other parties, it goes along with the general shift from upper to
middle and lower castes as the most numerous actors on the political scene. Significandy, the
radicalization of the party during the period of intensified Hindu-Muslim confrontation over the
Ayodhya temple -mosque dispute was led by lower-caste BJP leaders like Uma Bharati, Yinay
Katiyar and Kalyan Singh (BJP Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in 1991-92, politically responsible
for the demolition of the Babri Masjid).

Still, the BJP is often called a "party of Brahmins and Banias", and its political style justifies this
label to an extent. While Brahmins provide the Sanskritic (transregional, culture-centred) outlook, it
is the Bania merchants whose influence seems predominant in shaping the image and the
psychology of the party. [2] When a Leftist commentator tries to explain BJP policy decisions, he
usually blames the economic achievements and problems of the "urban traders" who seek to build
themselves a cultural identity and use the BJP to that end. It is even said that they, as aspiring
capitalists, use the RSS-BJP to reform Hinduism into a monolithic "Semitic" religion, supposedly
more fit as a cultural framework for capitalist development. [3]

The grain of truth in this Marxist reduction of the BJP programme to a mercantile strategy is that at
least psychologically, the BJP can best be understood as "a party of shopkeepers". The BJP is not
the party of the rich, who always tend to be on the side of power, i.e., the anti-BJP establishment (as
is evident from the media they own, and which are either mildly or virulently anti-BJP). But in large
measure the BJP has become the party of the aspiring middle and lower middle classes. Partly this is
because the last ten years or so, it had profiled itself as the least socialist and most pro-
entrepreneurial party. For the truly big business houses, this wasn't that important, because they had
established their own arrangements with the corrupt Nehruvian state; the stifling effect of
Nehruvian socialism was felt most acutely by smaller and newly-started businesses. To an even
larger extent, the success of the BJP is due to its promise of stopping the disintegration of India and
maintaining stability, a prerequisite for economic progress.

After its 1996 failure to win a confidence vote for its 13-day government, the BJP has accepted that
its only chance lies in gaining an absolute majority. Fortunately for the party, few Hindutva-minded

voters are fully informed about the week-kneed positions taken by its inner circle; most go by its
general Hindu image, and by the allegations of Hindu extremism spread by its opponents. On the
other hand, BJP strategists have a point when they calculate that many middle-of-the-road voters
need the assurance of moderation given by leaders like Vajpayee before they can cross the threshold
to voting for the BJP. In the heart of the mainstream Hindu voter, the combative Hindu feeling
goes underground as long as it is not provoked, and the moderate shopkeeper-type predominates,
so that in peace time (as in May 1996), he does not mind a shopkeeper mentality in the party he'll
vote for. But the relative quietness on the communal front may not last, and in troubled regions,
Hindus tend to set up more radical organizations, modelled on (and often named after) Mumbai's
Shiv Sena. The BJP had best prepare a contingency plan for the inevitable next round of
confrontation, or it will be pushed aside once more by impatient youngsters as it was on 6
December 1992.

The signature of the trader mentality is visible in the entire BJP approach to politics. Good traders
treat trade as a win-win situation: the seller makes a profit, the buyer acquires a desired product,
both making gains without forcing losses on their trading-partners. In humdrum peace time, of
course, this is the right attitude to politics. But in times of serious political confrontation, they have
difficulty in understanding that achieving one's own goal implies inflicting defeat on a second party.
Shopkeepers try to curry favour with everyone, and avoid straightforward ("divisive") ideological
stances and debates in order not to alienate potential business partners. Their idea of combativeness
is to outwit buyers and competitors; they fancy they can catch a much-desired prize on the cheap,
without confrontation.

This mentality was conspicuous during the Ayodhya affair, when the BJP fostered the illusion that
Hindu gain could be gotten without Muslim loss, that Muslims could be talked into abandoning
their claim to the disputed site, that confrontation was avoidable. The BJP was formally right, in
that the disputed building was no longer a mosque as idols had been worshipped in there since
1949. But in real terms, the Muslim leadership certainly felt deprived of something very important:
the Quran-based right to trample on non-Muslims, e.g. by usurping their sacred sites. Even though
the BJP's White Paper on Ayodhya and the Rama Temple Movement (1993) is a well- written and
generally complete document, certainly the best chronology of the whole Ayodhya dispute, it leaves
out a discussion of the one historical fact that justifies and lends importance to the Ayodhya
movement, viz. that the demolition of the medieval Rama temple at the site was by no means an
isolated event, but a necessary consequence of Islamic doctrine.

Not to antagonize Muslim and secularist opinion, the BJP avoided going into the question why the
Rama temple in Ayodhya, along with thousands of others, had been demolished by Muslim invaders
and rulers,— a question pregnant with doctrinal confrontation between idolatrous Hinduism and
iconoclastic Islam. Or rather, it gave a pseudo-explanation in terms of "foreign invaders" and
"national humiliation", hoping to trick the Indian Muslims into affirming that they too are part of
the Indian nation (as they always imply when they reject any identification of India with Hinduism)
and therefore feel equally strongly about the "national honour" embodied in the Rama temple-to-
be.

So far, so good: if they could resolve the controversy with superficial and syrupy rhetoric, without
raking up old history, that might have been defensible. But the point is that, first of all, this
accommodating attitude was not rewarded or even acknowledged in any way by the secularists (who
falsely maintained that the BJP was attacking Islam), and secondly, the BJP spokesmen did rake up
old history, though not in the anti-Islamic sense alleged by their enemies. When BJP spokesmen
mentioned history in the Ayodhya context, it was mostly to deny a fact inconvenient to their
opponents (whom they were trying to get into a positive mood), viz. the fact that iconoclasm and
intolerance are intrinsic elements of Islamic doctrine, and not aberrations from it. [4]

Sangh Parivar spokesmen have claimed that far from encouraging the annihilation of idol cults,
Islam actually prohibits the demolition of idol temples, and that the Prophet Mohammed had a
mosque demolished when he found that it had been built in forcible replacement of a temple. This
was a convenient fiction: the Islamic temple demolishers in India and elsewhere had always done
their thing with full backing from competent religious authorities, because Mohammed himself had
all non-Islamic places of worship in Arabia either demolished or turned into mosques, and his
model behaviour has an unfailing force of precedent in Islamic law. These facts are in conflict with
the alluring BJP plea that nothing in Islam prohibits the Muslims from accepting the conversion of
a mosque into an idol-house. The BJP shopkeepers calculated that a white lie might make the
desired Muslim abandonment of any claim to the Ayodhya site cheaper in terms of blood and sweat
expended. Of course, the Muslim leaders were not fooled into believing that Islam allows the
replacement of a mosque with an idol-house.

People who try to deceive others, thinking they are very clever, usually end up deceiving only
themselves and being disbelieved by others even when they do speak the truth. The BJP is not
convincing anyone when it claims that its prime concern in the Common Civil Code issue is the
well-being of Muslim women, or when it claims that it has no problems with Islam and Christianity
as such, or when it pleads that "genuine Islam" exhorts Muslims to abandon the Ayodhya mosque.
These positions fail to mollify the adversary, but they are very effective in confusing the BJP rank
and file, Hindu militants at heart but forced to defend secularist positions as a matter of party-line.

[1] In a TV debate on caste issues (ca. 1995), Ram Vilas Paswan attacked Dronacharya, the teacher
of the Pandavas, for refusing to teach the tribal boy Ekalavya. The reply to this could have been
that Drona's decision had nothing to do with caste considerations: he simply did the job he was
paid for, viz. to make the Pandavas the best archers in the land, not to teach his skills to any others
whatever their caste. Instead, VHP spokesman Giriraj Kishore disowned Drona, saying that "we do
not recognize him as an acharya". This way, Hindutva leaders disown everything which the
secularists attack.

[2] A long chapter could be written about the role of caste history and caste psychology as
determinants of politics in India. One example: in the British and post-colonial periods, the position
of the Thakur (landlord) steadily deteriorited, while that of the Bania changed for the better: he
became a modern entrepreneur, taking full advantage of modernization and urbanization. The envy
of successful Banias felt by impoverished Thakurs and Rajas is certainly one of the reasons why the
latter are so attracted to socialist-populist parties like the Janata Dal, typical examples being the

former Prime Ministers Chandra Shekhar and V.P. Singh.

[3] This is argued in all seriousness by Romila Thapar (in S. Gopal, ed.: Anatomy of a
Confrontation, p.159) and parroted by numerous columnists.

[4] At this point, there is a difference between the BJP, which tried to be as superficial about the
basic issue as possible, and the VHP, which developed a sharper position after accepting Chandra
Shekhar's invitation to mandate scholars to discuss the historical evidence concerning the disputed
site with a Babri Masjid Action Committee delegation (which withdrew from the talks when it
found it had no chance of winning). However, even in VHP ranks it is not uncommon to hear
preachers praise Mohammed and abuse Muslims for "misunderstanding" the Quran's true message.

16. Things to do for the BJP

The cleverness of the BJP is in evidence again in its choice to put the enactment of a Common Civil
Code on India's political agenda. In India, marriage, divorce and inheritance are regulated by
religion-based law codes which are different for Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Parsis. Thus, a
Hindu who wants to marry two women, knows that he will be punishable, but no longer if he
converts to Islam (which is why there are actual cases of conversion for the sake of bigamy). For
Christian men and women, divorce laws are equal but make it very difficult to obtain a divorce. For
Hindus, it is a bit easier, but divorce is the easiest by far for Muslim men, who only have to
pronounce triple talaq; Muslim women, by contrast, have to plead their case before a judge. This
totally non-secular arrangement was meant to be only temporary, for the Constitution stipulates in
its directive principles (Art. 44) that the State shall endeavour to enact a Common Civil Code. In
1995, the Supreme Court reminded the Government of this directive principle, and directed it to
report on the progress made in the matter. The BJP has replaced Ayodhya with the Common Civil
Code as its central "communal" theme.

The BJS-BJP has always demanded the implementation of Art.44, but the majority has blocked this
secular policy time and again. The cleverness about this Common Civil Code demand is that it can
be used both as proof of the BJP's secularism and as proof of the BJP's Hindu credibility. Many
Hindutva-minded voters mistakenly believe that the Muslims' high birth rate is due to polygamy,
and hope that a Common Civil Code will remedy this problem and thereby save the majority
position and hence the survival of Hinduism in India. Yet, in my opinion a realistic evaluation
would be that this issue is of little importance to specific Hindu interests. In a way, the Plural Civil
Code is more in keeping with Hindu tradition, where every caste had its own distinctive marriage
and inheritance customs. The Common Civil Code is not a demand of Hindu society (certainly not
a priority), but is intrinsically a demand of secularism.

There are excellent reasons for replacing the Muslim right to unilateral talaq with an egalitarian
arrangement valid for all Indian citizens equally, but it is doubtful that this desirable goal will be
reached by means of a BJP initiative. The trouble of raising this impeccably secular and explicidy
constitutional demand should be left to the secularists; as long as they don't put it on the agenda,
the present religion-based personal law systems are a standing testimony to the hypocrisy of the
secularist establishment. Equality before the law regardless of religion is an essential requirement of
a secular state, and it is a measure of the perversion of India's political parlance that BJP opponents
actually defend the separate religion-based civil codes in the name of secularism. But there is one
serious problem with this demand: with extremely few exceptions, and with secularist support, the
Muslim community 7 opposes it tooth and nail.

In a futile bid to win the Muslims over, the BJP claims that there is nothing un-Islamic about
abolishing the Sharia provisions on family matters, esp. by citing Muslim modernists like Malaysian
Prime Minister Mahathir as saying that the Sharia is obsolete, and by documenting how the Sharia
was only imposed on the Indian Muslims late in the British period, in replacement of the customary

laws which many Muslim communities had preserved since the time of their conversion. Less than a
century ago, the majority of the Indian Muslims did not follow the Sharia, true, but this only means
that they were bad or incomplete Muslims, not that Islam doesn't care about which personal law
system its faithful follow. Muslim tyrants and propagandists who converted Hindus did "first things
first": the converts had to be brought into the Muslim fold and develop an attachment to
Mohammed and the Quran; whether they also adapted their marriage and inheritance customs to
Islamic prescriptions (often a revolutionary change in their communal life) was a question that
could be put off till a more convenient time. While non-conformity with the Sharia can be tolerated
as an intermediate stage in the islamization of a community, it is obvious that once the Sharia is
established, it is un-Islamic to abolish it.

While the BJP congratulates itself on being so clever in insisting on an impeccably secular demand
like the Common Civil Code, it does not seem to be aware that, like with the Ayodhya campaign, it
is merely banging its head against the wall and making itself despised and hated. The most realistic
prediction is that an effective abolition of the religion-based personal law systems by a future BJP
government would provoke potentially violent agitations in every Muslim neighbourhood in India,
as well as attacks on Indian and Hindu targets in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Great Britain and other
countries. After all, the Ayodhya dispute was a fairly artificial conflict, in which the common
Muslim had no stake (it is a Hindu, not a Muslim sacred site, and no ordinary Muslim had any plans
ever to visit Ayodhya), and still it provoked a major wave of violence; but a change in the rules for
marriage, divorce and inheritance affects every single Muslim personally.

A secular Common Civil Code would also diminish the power of Muslim clerics within their own
community greatly. If we remember that the Shah of Iran turned a simmering discontent into an
armed revolution the day he hurt the material interests of the clerical class, we can imagine that in
India too, the mullahs would organize a massive resistance against such an attack on their position.
The Hindus would again be blackened worldwide as mean oppressors of the poor hapless
minorities, and the BJP's own government would find it hard to stay on course. There are no
indications that the BJP has a contingency plan for such a nation-wide Muslim agitation.

The BJP's focus on the sensitive Common Civil Code issue is all the more strange when we
consider that there are other, far safer and far more consequential issues waiting to be raised, which
have a potential for mobilizing the Hindus without automatically provoking the minorities. When
Sangh leaders are questioned on what grievances the Hindus could possibly have in a democratic
state with a Hindu majority, they often mention Art.30 of the Constitution, which lays down that
the minorities can set up government-sponsored denominational schools (implying the right to a
communal bias in recruitment of teachers and students and a religion-centred curriculum). When
the Constitutional Assembly voted this article, many delegates probably assumed that the extension
of the same rights to the Hindu majority was self-understood; but in practice, this right is denied to
the Hindus. This became hilariously clear in the 1980s, when the Ramakrishna Mission deemed it
necessary to declare itself a non-Hindu minority (a self-definition challenged in court by its own
members and struck down) in order to prevent the West Bengal government from nationalizing its
schools. [1] Art.30 constitutes a very serious discrimination on grounds of religion, and is in conflict
with the professed secular character of the Indian Republic.

In no democratic country would a majority community tolerate such discrimination, and it says a lot
about the stranglehold which the secularist intelligentsia has on public discourse that this article
hardly ever figures in debates on secularism and communalism. It also says a lot about the meekness
of the Hindus in general and about the incompetence of the Hindutva movement in particular.
Amending Art. 30 to extend the privileges of the minorities to every community including the
Hindus would benefit Hindu society as a whole, would terminate a humiliating and damaging
inequality, but would not affect the minorities; they retain the rights conceded to them in the
present version of Art.30. No doubt some minority and secularist agitators will try to explain that
equality before the law constitutes oppression of the minorities, but it should be feasible to restate
the correct position in such a way as to convince most unbiased observers. [2] At any rate, the
Muslim and Christian masses would not feel affected the way they would be in case of the
enactment of a Common Civil Code, and that makes the issue much easier to handle. So easy that
even the BJP could do it.

So, from the Hindutva movement's viewpoint, this should be a beautiful campaign theme: it is a
very consequential issue, it is very representative of the discrimination which Hindus claim to suffer
in secular India (and thereby justifies to the outside world why there has to be a Hindu movement
in the first place), the amendment is impeccably secular, and best of all: it is not directed against
anyone, it is a revolution with no enemies. If the BJP had any political acumen, it would have taken
a parliamentary initiative to amend Art.30, or prominently raised the issue in some other way, in the
months before the 1996 Lok Sabha elections. This would have forced the other parties to either
come out in support of the equality principle, so that the BJP could claim a major victory for Hindu
interests; or to defend the existing inequality, and in that case the BJP could go to the voter (and to
world opinion) with the unambiguous proof that it is not the BJP but the other parties which stand
for religious discrimination and injustice.

In spite of all the benefits which such an amendment would have for Hindu society as well as for
the BJP, no attempt was made in that direction. The 1996 BJP Election Manifesto does not
mention Art.30 in the list of "Constitutional reforms" proposed on p.9-10. The article is mentioned
only on p.64 in a two-line promise, fifth in a list of fourteen points under the heading "Our
minorities": "5. Ensure equality for all and discrimination against none on grounds of religion in
matters of education by amending Article 30." Note that the BJP does not find the issue sufficiendy
important for spelling out just what amendment it proposes. The record shows that the BJS/BJP
parliamentarians (including India's longest-serving parliamentarian, A.B. Vajpayee) have never taken
any initiative on this matter. No politician with whom I have spoken could give a credible
explanation for this decades-long negligence.

The VHP included the demand of an amendment to Art.30 in its Hindu Agenda (a list of 40
demands presented to all political parties, drawn up during the VHP National Board meeting in
Mumbai in December 1995, which I attended), but not with due prominence. A leading VHP sadhu
explained to me that he and his colleagues had found the temple issue (liberation of the sacred sites
in Kashi and Mathura) to be the best mobilizer among the masses, while issues like Art.30 attracted
little attention among the people. My suspicion is that he neither questioned nor informed common
people about Art.30, and that his finding was perfectly circular: if you only think and talk about the

disputed temples, it is obvious that this is what people will respond to. The Hindutva activists
attribute to the people their own narrow focus on symbolic but inconsequential issues. When you
see how the small Christian community can lobby and mobilize for its "Reservations for Dalit
Christians" demand, the claimed difficulty in mobilizing Hindus against their second-class status in
education sounds like sheer laziness. At any rate, leaders don't ask the masses for motivation, they
motivate.

Among BJP spokesmen, it was only Rama Jois, the lawyer representing the BJP before the Supreme
Court in connection with the Ayodhya dispute (1993-94), who agreed with conviction that the BJP
should take up the issue and showed that he had even given some thought to the formulation of the
required amendment. [3] The only Member of Parliament who has formally proposed an
amendment to Art.30, extending minority privileges to the majority, is Syed Shahabuddin (April
1995). His ostensible reason was that every linguistic or religious community 7 which is in a minority
at some level, is bound to also be the majority at some other level (say, national versus provincial or
local). His Bill never made it to the voting stage, but it showed how Shahabuddin is aware of the
mobilizing potential of the Art.30 issue: he tried to defuse it before the BJP could acquire the brains
to perceive and exploit this potential.

If anti-Hindu leaders like Shahabuddin can see the importance of this issue, how come the BJP
leadership is ignoring it? Is it sheer brain paralysis, as Hindu critics of the BJP allege, that the BJP
spurns manageable and important issues in favour of unmanageable and unimportant ones? In this
case, I really don't know even the beginning of an explanation. It is typical of Sangh mores to put
on a clever face and pretend there is a secret long-term strategy which will take care of everything,
but I am skeptical.

Article 30 is the Constitutional bedrock of a considerable list of similar anti-Hindu
discriminations. [4] Among them is the unequal treatment of Hindu and non-Hindu places of
worship. Muslims have full control of their mosques, Christians have full control of their churches,
but Hindus are systematically deprived of the control of their temples. Recendy the authorities tried
(unsuccessfully) to have the Shirdi Sai Baba temple in Hyderabad declared a Hindu temple, because
that would allow them to take it over and do what they have been doing everywhere to Hindu
temples: siphon the income off to their own pockets or to other non-Hindu purposes. This is a
major factor in the dire poverty which Hindu temple priests (whose wages have not been adjusted
for decades) and their families suffer.

Injustice to Hindus in education and temple management: here are two problems with deep and
painful effects on the life and the future of Hinduism, and what is the BJP doing? If the BJP does
not take up these issues, if it does not present a short-term plan to remedy this injustice, if its state
governments do not do everything within their power to give at least partial solutions to these
problems with immediate effect, then the party does not deserve to get a single Hindu vote.

[1] The attempts of the RK Mission and of an Arya Samaj faction to get recognition as a religious
minority prove several things: that Hinduism is a dirty 7 word and many Hindus are ashamed to be
called Hindu; but also that Hindus under threat do not count on the BJP to defend them, and

prefer the safety exit to minority status.

[2] I remember M.J. Akbar arguing to this effect against any tampering with Art.30, on the
assumption that this would mean bringing the position of the minorities down to that of the
Hindus, rather than adjusting the Hindu position upward. Among foreign India -watchers too, the
impression exists that the BJP would take away these rights from the minorities rather than extend
them to the Hindus; this may be due to disinformation by the M.J. Akbars of this world, but
unfortunately, it cannot be excluded that some Hindutva spokesman has indeed been stupid enough
to interpret "amending Article 30" in this sense, unmindful of the terrific agitation which this would
provoke among the minorities.

[3] Interview, December 1995, Vadodara. Jois's comment on the Supreme Court verdict (rejecting a
request by the Narasimha Rao government to pass judgment on the historical question whether the
Babri mosque had indeed been built in forcible replacement of a Hindu temple) is in Swapan
Dasgupta et al.: The Ayodhya Reference (Voice of India 1995), p.96-106.

[4] Discussed in Abhas Chatterjee: The Concept of Hindu State, p.33-44.

17. Christ in India

The Sangh is even less combative vis-a-vis Christianity than vis-a-vis Islam. The Christian Churches
must be counted among Hindutva's most determined enemies. Much of the negative image which
the BJP has acquired internationally is due to the lasting powerful impact of the Churches on the
information stream concerning the Third World. In quarrels between the Hindutva forces and the
Muslims or the secularists, the Christian institutions are invariably on the anti-Hindu side. There are
also Christian armed separatist movements in Nagaland and Mizoram, which are openly supported
by the World Council of Churches and by a number of Catholic institutions.

Some Hindu writers have therefore developed detailed criticisms of Christian political behaviour in
India, detailing records of conversion, and discussing the missions' international sponsoring.fi] This
line of argument is also developed in books formally published by the Sangh Parivar itself through
its "think-tank", the Deendayal Research Institute, most notably Devendra Swarup, ed.: Politics of
Conversion (1986). A more fundamental critique of Christianity itself, regardless of its alleged "anti-
national designs" and use as an "instrument of the Western powers", but more in touch with
Western developments in Church history and Bible research, is only available in publications by
independent writers, mostly through Voice of India. [2]

The Sangh Parivar cannot be accused of a confrontationist stance vis-a-vis the Christians and the
missionaries. The single most frightening moment for the Christian mission strategists was in the
mid-1950s, when the BJS was hardly in the picture as a political force. The Congress government of
Madhya Pradesh ordered an investigation of fraudulent conversions through social pressure and
material inducement by Christian missionaries in the tribal belt. The BJS supported the
implementation of the recommendations (for a much stricter control of missionary activities and
finances) concluding the highly critical report of this committee. The BJS 1957 election manifesto
stated: "The recommendations of the Niyogi Committee and Rege Committee will be implemented
to free the Bharatiya Christians from the anti-national influence of foreign missionaries." [3] Remark
the language used: it sounds as if the BJS wants to protect the Christians against the missionaries.
Then already, it apparently felt the need to cloak its concern for Hindu (including tribal) interests in
an ostensible concern for the minorities. At any rate, Nehru prevented the report from having any
political consequences.

The BJS took up the same thread of checking the missionary activities when it reckoned it was in a
stronger position to impose its will, viz. when it was part of the Janata Party government. In 1978,
O.P. Tyagi proposed his Freedom of Religion Bill in the Lok Sabha, with the object of prohibiting
conversions by force or allurement. The Christian missions launched a worldwide propaganda
campaign against it, and the Leftist sections of the Janata Party also opposed it, so that nothing
came of it. But the BJS had at least tried; the BJP cannot even be credited with trying.

In 1994, the Churches created a similar stir, on the occasion of a very small incident in the Chennai
area. After reading Ishwar Sharan's book The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva

Temple, which argued that a number of churches including the one commemorating Saint
Thomas's alleged martyrdom had been built on destroyed Shiva temples, a back-bench member of
the RSS-affiliated Tamil organization Hindu Munnani went to a church in Pondicherry, equipped
with the paraphernalia for puja, and inquired where the Shiva lingam was, so that he could worship
it. He had learnt that the Cathedral had been built on the site of the Vedapuri-Ishwaran Temple
after the temple had been destroyed in 1748 by the Jesuits aided by the then French governor of
Pondicherry. Immediately, the Catholic Church was alarmed and warned that the Hindu
fundamentalists were trying to create a second Ayodhya affair. The Hindu Munnani responded to
the challenge in a very modest way, holding a small demonstration near the church (as close as the
police allowed them to go) to draw attention to the Catholic Church's record in the attempted
destruction of Hinduism in South India.

The Hindu Munnani did not let the controversy escalate any further, not least because the BJP had
immediately disowned the fledgling movement. The story of how the Vedapuri-Ishwaran temple
was destroyed had been documented in great detail in Sita Ram God's History of Hindu Christian
Encounters published in 1989. He requested an RSS journalist whose syndicated column was
published in many newspapers across the country, to make the story more widely known by
devoting one of the articles to it. He agreed but did not keep his promise. Goel tried to get the story
summarized in the Organizer also, and immediately sent a copy of his book to the editor who
expressed willingness over the telephone. But weeks passed without the weekly even mentioning
the episode. Later on, it was learnt that the Sangh leaders had decided to suppress the story, and so
it was blocked out of the media controlled by the Sangh Parivar. When I mentioned this incident to
some leading BJP members, none of them expressed any interest in, let alone sympathy for the
Hindu Munnani's position. K.R. Malkani, whom the media always describe as "BJP ideologue",
laughed it off and said that "we have no quarrel with the Christians".

Why did the BJP refuse to focus attention on the record of Christian aggression? Though focusing
on conflictual chapters in history has been decried and condemned in the strongest terms when
Hindus did just that during the Ayodhya campaign, it is a perfecdy respectable activity in other parts
of the world. Every now and then, we hear of some new monument or movie commemorating the
Holocaust and confirming the Germans in their role of culprits. Monuments are being built to
commemorate the victims of Communism, and hence to draw attention to the guilt of their
Communist oppressors and executioners. Except for Hindu society victimized in centuries of
Muslim rule, every community which considers itself the victim of large-scale aggression at some
point in history freely exercises the right to fix the memory of this crime in the collective
consciousness.

Most to the point, the not-so-gentle conquest and Christianization of the Americas has been
commemorated on a very large scale in 1 992, on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing. It so
happens that another 500th anniversary in approaching: that of Vasco da Gama's landing in India in
1498. Juridically and theologically, this event was the exact counterpart of Columbus's landing in
America. In the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, the Pope had allotted two halves of the world to Spain
and Portugal, on condition that these Christian states organize the Christianization of their
respective colonies. Most of America and East Asia fell to Spain, while Portugal got the area from

Brazil to China, including Africa and India. The Portuguese were less successful in India than the
Spanish were in America, not because their intentions and methods were different, but simply
because the power equation was different: the Indians were better equipped (cannon, horses,
resistance to diseases) than the Native Americans, while the Portuguese were fewer in number than
the Spanish. On a smaller scale, the Portuguese in India behaved just like the Spanish in America:
forcible conversions, massacres of the native priesthood, destruction of places of worship.

Therefore, the question arises: is there any chance of a 1998 commemoration comparable to the
1992 commemorations? In 1992, even the Pope felt he couldn't ignore the painful anniversary, and
in the name of the Catholic Church, he publicly apologized to the Native Americans. This was the
result of a broad movement in public opinion, including the cultural sector and politicians from
every American country. Is there any chance that the Pope will feel sufficiently pressured to do the
same thing towards the Hindus? As things stand at the time of writing, it looks like there will be no
trace of a similar Christian soul-searching, simply because there will be no Hindu pressure in that
direction. In December 1995, Hindu Munnani activists in Chennai told me that they vaguely
consider "doing something", but no writer or film director is creating an opinion climate, and even
the political party allegedly waging a campaign against the Christians is not taking up the issue at all.
Mr. Malkani emphatically denied that the BJP would ever consider participating in or give a lead to
such a movement.

To sum up, while a part of the BJP constituency certainly harbours anti-Christian feelings, the BJP
is careful to avoid any confrontation with the powerful Christian Churches. One reason is that most
Hindus are simply not sufficiently informed about Christianity to take it on in any meaningful way
(often sentimentally cherishing crazy myths about Jesus having lived in India, the Gospel teaching
yoga, etc.). Another is that the calculating BJP politicians see courtesy to Christianity as one of the
prerequisites for achieving the mirage -like goal of being accepted as secular.

[1] Typical examples are Brahma Datt Bharati: Christian Conversions (1980), Thanulinga Nadar:
Unrest at Kanyakumari (1983), and Major T.R. Vedantham: Christianity, a Political Problem (1984).

[2] Examples are Ram Swarup: Hindu View of Christianity and Islam (1992) and Hindu-Buddhist
Rejoinder to Pope John-Paul II (1995), Sita Ram Goel: History of Hindu-Christian Encounters
(1989, 1996) and Jesus Christ, Artifice for Aggression (1995), Ishwar Sharan: The Myth of Saint
Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple (1991, 1994), and Arun Shourie: Missionaries in India
(1994).

[3] Party Documents, vol.l, p.82.

18. Hindus wielding the sword of
Islam

When Akbar had Rajput armies fight his Rajput enemies, he rejoiced at the sight of "Hindus
wielding the sword of Islam". When his archers could not distinguish between the Rajput
mercenaries and the Rajput freedom-fighters, he told them that it didn't matter, since anyone killed
would be a Kafir anyway. India's greatest Moghul is often mindlessly lauded by Hindus as a
"secular" ruler, but while he should be credited with a certain wisdom, he was and remained an
enemy of the Infidels. Unlike the Delhi sultans, who constantly provoked Hindu uprisings with
their cruel politics of jihad (apart from weakening themselves with their internecine fighting), Akbar
managed to consolidate a Muslim empire by incorporating a sufficient number of Hindus in his
apparatus.

Thus, his abolition of the jizya (which could seldom be collected in mral areas where most Hindus
lived) need not be read as a gesture of communal amity, but rather as a clever way of opening new
tax channels to the rural masses through mostly Hindu tax collectors. He extracted a much larger
revenue from Hindu tax -payers in the form of land tax or other secular formulas, than his
predecessors had managed to do through the jizya. And it is through Akbar's tax collecting system
that Aurangzeb would later collect his re -instituted jizya.

On the Hindu side too, things are not always what they seem, and some reputations for Hindu
bravery deserve some reconsideration, precisely because on closer scrutiny, they were "Hindus
wielding the sword of Islam". Thus, Guru Govind Singh declared in his Zafar-nama ("victory
letter", though there is nothing victorious about its superficially defiant but basically toadyist
contents) that like Aurangzeb, he too was an idol-breaker. In spite of the RSS veneration for
Govind Singh and his "sword-arm of Hinduism", the germ of Sikh separatism and the islamization
of Sikhism was already in evidence in his words and deeds. The Marathas started as Hindu freedom
fighters, but ended as bullies to the Rajputs, Jats and Sikhs, and as vassals of the Moghuls. The
Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj wanted to defend Hinduism against Christian and Islamic
aggression, but started by attacking the elements in Hinduism which contrasted most with
Christianity and Islam (polytheism, idol- worship), and promoted their Christian-Islamic
counterparts instead.

What about the Sangh?

Where Hindus have an acute problem with Muslims or Islam, they tend to vote BJP except where
they have tougher alternatives. Yet, the record does not bear out the deduction that the BJP must
be quite an anti-Muslim party. It will never initiate any policies specifically targeting the Muslims
(such as the unkept promise of a crackdown on Bangladeshi infiltrators) except in an externally
provoked Hindu-Muslim crisis of major proportions, i.e. a genuine armed Muslim uprising,-- but

under such circumstances most non-BJP governments would take similar positions.

Contrary to certain impressions created in the media, the BJS-BJP and RSS leaders have a heartfelt
desire to woo the Muslims. The present official position of the RSS (and a fortiori of the BJP) is,
more than ever, that Islam itself is quite alright, only fundamentalism is wrong. Even the well-
known secularist theory that the Hindu-Muslim conflict was merely a concoction of the wily British
colonizers is often repeated in RSS publications, sometimes with the addition that Congress and
other secularist parties have now assumed the divisive role which the British once played. In every
case, the role of the intrinsic hostility which Islam itself preaches and practises against "idolatry" is
downplayed or kept out of the picture.

It is easy to establsh that the Sangh is not preparing but rather avoiding any confrontation with
Islam. The BJP and other Hindu organizations do perceive militant Islam as a genuine threat to
Hindu society: "It is being realized by all democratic countries that today the greatest threat to
world peace emanates from Islamic fundamentalism." [1] But though the claim of an actual
consensus in the democratic countries is exaggerated, this is hardly an original or outlandish
observation. Among the many who made similar remarks, we may mention former NATO
Secretary-General Willy Claes, who said in early 1995 that militant Islam may be about to replace
Communism as the global threat claiming the vigilance (and hence justifying the existence) of
NATO.

A few RSS authors do expect a confrontation between Islam and other powers, and some have
even brought in Samuel Huntingdon's well-known theory of the "Clash of Civilizations". [2] Mostly,
the thmst of this line of thought is not to predict a Hindu-Muslim confrontation, but a conflict
between Islam and the West. The Hindutva audience likes this a lot, for the same reason why it is so
fond of astrological predictions that India will become a Hindu state in the near future:
Huntingdon's predicted clash between Islam and the West would make things easy for the Hindus,
viz. by taking the pressure off India. Hindus often translate Huntingdon-type predictions as: "the
West will take care of Islam" — meaning that for all their apprehensions about the rising power of
Islam, Hindus will not need to do anything themselves. This type of discourse confirms that many
Hindus are profoundly uncomfortable with the Islamic presence in and around India, yet they do
not consider themselves to be the rock in the storm on which victory against Islam depends.

But the Hindutva forces are not content to just dream of third parties eliminating the Islam
problem. They also actively counter those in India who want to get serious about uprooting Islam.
The BJP goes out of its way to assure everyone that it has no bad feelings towards Islam as such,
e.g.: "To oppose Islamic fundamentalism does not mean to oppose Islam, which like all other major
faiths is a religion of love, peace and brotherhood." [3] It strongly discourages those within its own
ranks who want to face the Islam problem squarely. The BJP government of Delhi has refused to
cancel judicial proceedings initiated by its secularist predecessors against Voice of India for the
publication Understanding Islam through Hadis by Ram Swarup. In fact, the Sangh tries to blunt
the sword of those who take on Islam, and thereby effectively defends Islam.

Even in the RSS weeklies, while the case against Islamic "fundamentalism" inside and outside of
India is documented and argued week after week (nowadays mostly in the well-written columns of

V.P. Bhatia and Muzaffer Hussain), criticism of Islam itself is extremely rare. When in the 1980s the
historian Sita Ram Goel filled a weekly column in Organiser with mustering evidence for his
position that fundamentalist intolerance is the essence of Islam itself rather than a deviation, RSS
General Secretary H.V. Seshadri intervened to have the column discontinued and the editor, the
arch-moderate K.R. Malkani, sacked. The reason given for the discontinuation was that "otherwise,
with such attacks on Islam, the Muslims will not join us". The same reason was given by the BJS
leadership when asking Balraj Madhok to leave the party, in 1973, "on the grounds that since
Muslims had become allergic to me they would not join the party". [4]

It is hard to conceive of a situation where a society is vexed and tortured by a persistent enemy,
then generates a millions-strong organization pledged to the defence of this society, and yet this
organization, this boastful "vanguard", fails to produce even the most sketchy analysis of the
motives and methods of this enemy. Only Hindus could fare this badly. Fifty years after the
Partition, twenty-six years after the East Bengal genocide, there are still Hindus singing mendacious
refrains like Ram Rahim Ek Hai and "equal truth of all religions", because their supposed leaders
have never bothered to inform them. A large part of the reason is to be found in specific choices
made by the Sangh leadership, most of all the choice to seek secular respectability by means of
appeasement policies including flattery of Mohammed and Islam.

Now that the Sangh exists, many activist Hindus gravitate towards it, but otherwise they would have
set up their own shops and worked for Hinduism according to their own lights rather than follow
the Sangh party-line. I am sure that in that case, the ideological struggle against Islam would have
been waged much more vigorously, because most normally intelligent people consider it obvious
that the existence of a problem warrants an investigation of its causes, i.e., that the suffering of
Hindu society under Islamic aggression urgently warrants scrutiny of the doctrine and historical
models underlying the characteristic behaviour pattern of Islam. By deliberately suppressing this
perfectly natural ideological mobilization of the Hindus against Islam, the Sangh has effectively
acted as Islam's first line of defence.

[1] Foreign Policy Resolutions, p.5 (1995).

[2] V.P. Bhatia: "The coming clash of civilisations", Organiser, 18-25/2/1996. I myself was invited
by the Deendayal Research Institute to speak on this theme (February 1995).

[3] Foreign Policy Resolutions, p.5 (1995).

[4] That at least is Madhok's own version, see Balraj Madhok: "A Question of Power", Indian
Express, 29 October 1995.

19. How not to deal with Islam

When dealing with Islam, it is crucially important to keep in mind the distinction between Islam as a
doctrine and the Muslims, a group of people who were born or tricked into an Islamic
environment. There is nothing intrinsically Islamic about human beings, not even when they are
named Mohammed or Aisha.

In Europe, the secularist Left accuses the mushrooming national-populist and xenophobic parties
of a "biologization of cultural differences". When the said parties plead that they have put "racism"
behind them, that they have nothing against coloured people or foreigners per se, and that they only
fear for social disharmony as a consequence of the co-existence of European and immigrant
cultures, their opponents rightly argue that this implies a belief in the permanent character of
people's cultural identity. By assuming that immigrant foreigners are bound to remain culturally
foreign, the xenophobes treat cultural identity as if it were a racial characteristic: a permanent and
hereditary trait. In reality, of course, cultural identities change, e.g. most second-generation Hindu
immigrants have moved rather closely towards the mainstream culture of their adopted countries.
Cultural identity including religion is not a permanent or hereditary trait.

Yet, in India, the secularist Left, always ready to take stands directly opposed to what counts
internationally as secular, insists that the Muslim cultural identity is a permanent fact of life with
which Hindus will have to co-exist in perpetuity. Just as whites are bound to remain white and
blacks are certain to remain black, Muslims are bound to remain Muslim, and Hindus just have to
learn to live with them. (The implication that Hindus should remain Hindu, however, does not
apply: any criticism of conversion of Hindus to Islam or Christianity is either condemned or
ridiculed.)

This secularist "biologization of Islam" is also assumed, quite mindlessly, by most supposedly
Hindu organizations. Their schemes for solving the communal problem are entirely within the
framework of Hindu-Muslim co-existence: first there are the Hindu and the Muslim community,
and next we have to find a way to make them co-exist. The harder they try to be secular, the more
they reduce the Islam problem to one of co-existence with a community which is somehow
different, though the nature of that difference is emphatically not up for analysis. Not one bad word
will they say about Islam, even though it is Islam and nothing else which separates the Indian
Muslims from their fellow Indians, and even though the problem of how to integrate the Muslims
into the Hindutva identity constandy occupies their minds.

This approach is politically counterproductive, as we shall argue, and it is unhistorical in its
acceptance of Islam on a par with Hinduism. Firsdy, Hinduism is a civilization in its own right,
developed as mankind's answer to certain questions and problems, both practical and profound, but
Islam is merely a reactive phenomenon, generally destructive of (and at best parasitic on) ancient
and genuine civilizations. Secondly, in India's religious landscape, the Indian Muslim community is
but a fairly recent addition cut out of the flesh of Hindu society.

Moreover, this approach of shielding Islam from critical enquiry is unfair to Islam by emphatically
ignoring Islam's own self-definition as a religion based on a truth claim, viz. that "there is no god
but Allah and Mohammed is Allah's prophet", a truth claim which can and must be evaluated as
either true or false.

Finally, this non-doctrinal approach to the Muslim community creates the impression (gleefully
picked up by the legions of communalism-watchers out to blacken Hindu society and its defenders)
of a purely xenophobic motivation, similar to that of anti-foreigner parties in the West. Xenophobic
parties in the West are faced with the problem that the country which they claim for their own
nation is "invaded" by an outsider population which they cannot or will not assimilate. The cadres
of these parties are often ideologues of ethnic or racial purity who do not want to assimilate Blacks
or North -Africans or Turks, just as their grandfathers once rejected the assimilation of Jews. The
recent electoral growth of these parties is, by contrast, mainly due to working-class people who have
assimilated immigrant labour (Italians, Poles) before, but who now find that certain new immigrant
groups (particularly Muslims) in their neighbourhoods cultivate their separateness. They fear that,
against their own wish, they can not assimilate these separatist newcomers, and that their children
will be faced with a civil war. Either way, the starting-point of these xenophobic parties is the
separateness or non-assimilation of foreigner populations, and their "only solution" is to send these
immigrants (and their children and grandchildren) back to their countries of origin.

In India, most Muslims are not immigrants even in the tenth generation, but otherwise the mistake
made by their opponents is the same as in Europe: accepting the Muslimness of these Muslims as
an unshakable basic fact which any policy must take into account.

The best example of this alleged similarity is the common complaint about the Islamic birth rate.

On the Hindutva fringe, there are pamphlets which falsely cite the World Health Organization as
having established that within twenty years or so, Muslims will be the majority in India. More
serious publications, including Organiser and BJP Today, report a slower but nonetheless
impressive increase in the Muslim percentage of India's population, recorded in every decadal
census since 1881, and projected to continue at an even faster rate in the coming decades. In
essence, this picture is correct: the percentage of Muslims shows a persistent increase at the expense
of the Hindu percentage, with the rate of increase itself increasing. Given the higher Hindu
participation in the birth control effort of the 1960s and 70s, we must now be witnessing a
cumulative effect, of a proportionately smaller number of Hindu mothers (born in that period)
having in their turn each a smaller number of children than the proportionately larger number of
Muslim mothers, on average. On top of the higher birth rate of Muslims within the Indian Union,
there is the dramatic influx of millions upon millions of Bangladeshis and also some Pakistanis.

The fact that in 1991 the Indian government has chosen to replace a real census count of religious
adherence with an estimate is itself an indication that the Muslim percentage is now rising at an
alarming rate. In fact, the estimate was demonstrably rigged. It shows a slight decrease in the rate at
which the Muslim percentage increases: up by 0.52% between 1971 (11.21%) and 1981 (11.73%),
up by 0.47% between 1981 and 1991 (12.20). However, all data about the Hindu-Muslim

differential in birth control and birth figures imply that the rate of Muslim increase is itself
increasing, even without counting the estimated ten million Bangladeshi Muslims who entered India
between 1981 and 1991 .[1] On top of the native increase, we must add the figure of the said
immigrants, which by itself amounts to more than 1% of India's population, twice as high as the
total growth of the Muslim percentage as claimed by the Government. For once, I agree with Imam
Bukhari, who has been saying for long that the Indian government systematically understates the
number of Muslims in India. The total increase between 1981 and 1991 must be at least 1.5%.
Assuming that the 1981 figure is correct, the 1991 figure is definitely higher than 13%, or at least
1% higher than the government claims.

So far, so good: the Sangh is right about the substantial increase in the Muslim percentage of the
Indian population. A realistic projection into the future of present demographic (including
migratory) trends does predict a Muslim majority in the Subcontinent by the mid-21st century, and
a Muslim majority in the Indian Union by the turn of the 22nd century (in some regions much
earlier). Though generally correct, this type of calculation is subject to an unkind comparison: the
same type of projection occupies the minds of white racists in the USA. They expect that whites
will cease to be the majority there by the mid-21st century, and they too are worried and unable to
stem the tide. But there are two important differences.

The first one is that the non-whites in the USA do not or need not form a genuine problem for US
whites, because people of different ethnic backgrounds can and do share in the same American
Dream, can and do participate in a common American society. By contrast, Islam in India is
intrinsically separatist and aiming for hegemony and ultimately for the destruction of Hinduism
through conversion or otherwise. There is nothing intrinsically anti-white about blacks, but there is
definitely something intrinsically anti-Hindu about Islam. For this reason, the concern of whites
about the growth of non-white groups in the USA is reprehensible, but the concern of Hindus
about the growth of Islam is entirely justified.

The second difference is that people's membership of certain racial groups, black or white or other,
is unchangeable; while the potentially alarming adherence of people to Islam is entirely changeable.
And it is at this last point that the BJP-cum-secularist acceptance of the Islamic identity of the
Indian Muslims distorts the picture.

Like American white racists, BJP secularists are, in their heart of hearts, worried about the
demographic increase of the minorities, but they don't want to admit it in so many words. Thus, in
its 1996 Election Manifesto, the BJP warns that because of Bangladeshi infiltration, "various
demographic entities are bound to come in conflict" due to "an alarming growth of a section of the
population"; already, "a section of the population has grown by almost 100 per cent" in certain
northeastern areas. [2] The BJP dooms itself to impotence by refusing to define the problem in its
proper terms. Not wanting to sound anti-Muslim, the BJP avoids facing the "communal" angle,
with the result that the Communist government in West Bengal cracks down on Hindu refugees
and forces them back into Bangladesh, just to show the BJP what the asked-for crackdown on
religiously undefined "Bangladeshi infiltrators" would mean in practice. Worse, even to the extent
that the BJP does identify the problem as "illegal Bangladeshi Muslims", it dooms itself to an

unimaginative (and by now probably unrealistic) solution, viz. to physically push these people back
across the border. [3]

This grudgingly admitted concern about the increasing Muslim presence, combined with the feeling
of impotence to stop this ominous increase, leads to certain undesirable ideas, which you do not
find in BJP or RSS publications, but which do come out in more extreme pamphlets of fringe
groups and in unrecorded conversations. One such idea is that birth control should be made
compulsory, e.g. by enforcing vasectomy on every father of two children. Another idea in this
category is that Hindus should reintroduce polygamy (as I read in a pamphlet by British NRIs). A
third, propagated by the Puri Shankaracharya among others, is that Hindus should return to having
as many children per woman as possible (quite like the natalist propaganda of xenophobic parties in
Europe). A fourth is that all Indian Muslims should go to Pakistan, which was, after all, created for
them ("Mussalman ke do hi sthan: Pakistan ya qabrastan"). In 1947 this was, coupled with an
ordered evacuation of Hindus from Pakistan, an eminently sensible proposal which could have
saved millions of lives (including those yet to be lost in future clashes resulting from Hindu-Muslim
"co-existence" in India). [4] Today, however, it could only be done by means of extreme violence,
comparable in intensity to (but a hundred times larger than) the full-scale civil war which preceded
the expulsion of the French inhabitants of Algeria in 1962.

Hindutva men of the drinking kind utter such ideas in the late hours, when they are ashamed about
their party's non-performance on the communal front and feel the need to strike a more martial
profile. These are indeed drunkards' ideas. Within their scheme of things, the choice is one of
simply letting the Muslims take over India as soon as they become numerous enough (which is well
before they reach the 50% mark, e.g. Jinnah was offered the government by Gandhi when the
Muslims were hardly 24% in undivided India); or implementing one of the said scenarios of
demographic competition or ethnic cleansing. I cannot blame anti-Hindu authors for highlighting
such ideas as all too similar to certain forms of xenophobia and racism elsewhere.

Thoughtful Hindus, by contrast, have no such problem. They don't rely on numbers but on
consciousness, the secret weapon which will blow Islam away. Let the Indian Muslims "breed like
rats": it is thanks to them that India will overtake China as the most populous country in the world
(a doubtful honour in this age, but these millions may be needed one day). All that is needed to
avert the catastrophe of a Muslim take-over, is that these numerous children of Muslim parents are
properly educated.

It is a well-known fact that most South-Asian Muslims are the descendents of converts from
Hinduism. As for the Turkish, Persian or Arabic components of the Muslim community, they too
are the descendents of converts, be it from Buddhism or Zoroastrianism or some other Kafir
religion. There is nothing intrinsically Muslim even about Arabs, who were the first victims of
Islam. Islamic scripture itself is quite unambiguous about the terror which Mohammed and his
companions used to pressurize the Arabs into joining them; and about the national Arab revolt
against Islam after Mohammed's death, a war of liberation which they only lost because they did not
resort to the same ruthless style of warfare which Mohammed had introduced. The people known
as Muslims have walked into Islam, and they are bound to walk out again as well. Powerful as the

conditioning of Islamic indoctrination may be, it remains a superficial imposition susceptible to the
law of impermanence. That is why any solution which starts by assuming the Muslimness of the
Muslims, is mistaken.

[1] The clearest eye-opener is the birth-rate in the relatively affluent Muslim-majority district of
Malappuram in highly-literate Kerala (see Baljit Rai: Is India Going Islamic?, p.103-106); at 75.22%,
the female literacy rate in Malappuram is twice as high as for most Hindu communities in the Hindi
belt. In the decade 1981-91 its population grew by 28.74%, well above the national average of
23.50% and more than twice the Kerala average of 13.98%. This disproves the usual excuse that the
birth-rate automatically follows the poverty rate and the illiteracy rate. Most Hindu Scheduled Caste
people whom I know have settled for smaller families, but by and large, Muslims have not changed
their appetite for large families. Ever since the propagation of birth control among the Hindu
masses, rich and literate Muslims have more children than poor and illiterate Hindus.

[2] BJP Election Manifesto 1996: For a Strong and Prosperous India, p.39. This is practically a
parody of secularist riot reporting (where "Muslims burned a temple down" becomes "members of
a particular community damaged a religious building").

[3] It is a different matter that the BJP state government in Delhi, voted to power in 1993 on a
platform prominently including a crackdown on Bangladeshi infiltrators, has totally gone back on
this promise.

[4] The chance to organize a peaceful and ordered exchange of population (not the optimum
solution but certainly the lesser evil after Partition had been conceded), though proposed as early as
1940 by Dr. Ambedkar, was spurned by Gandhi and Nehru, who preferred to see the millions bleed
rather than give up their dogma of a "composite culture". The 20th century AD has been full of
enlightened leaders sacrificing millions of real human beings on the altar of ideological chimaeras.

20. How to deal with Islam

The "communal" problem is simple, and so is its solution. The root cause of communal riots, of the
Partition with its nearly a million victims, and of the East Bengal genocide with its three million
victims, is the Islamic doctrine of permanent hostility against the unbelievers. [1] As the Quran says:
"Fight them until idolatry is no more and religion belongs to Allah alone" (2:193 and 8:39), and:
"Enmity and hate shall reign between us until ye believe in Allah alone" (60:4). More than 70
passages in the Quran teach that non-Muslims are to be shunned and treated as enemies, that they
are bound for hellfire, and that rulership in this and bliss in the next world is reserved for Muslims
alone. This body of doctrine is further corroborated and enriched with like-minded statements and
model acts of Mohammed and his companions, and systematized by theologians and jurists. The
solution is obvious: remove the intrinsically communal and separatist doctrine of Islam from the
minds of its misguided followers. Educate them so that they can laugh at the primitive beliefs which
have held them captive for so long, just as adults can take a laugh at their own childhood illusions.

Sounds radical? This was the solution offered by the Arya Samaj, a progressive Hindu reform
movement, which put the large-scale reconversion of Muslims to the Yedic tradition high on Hindu
society's agenda. Its central doctrinal book, Swami Dayananda Saraswati's Satyartha Prakash (1875),
contained the first Hindu vivisection of Islamic doctrine, still a bit clumsy but on the right track.

The movement had its martyrs, several authors of publications on Islam and leaders of the
reconversion movement killed by Muslim activists; but it never indulged in any similar forms of
violence.

Indeed, frank debate on ideas is inversely proportionate with riots and bomb attacks. For this
reason, the secularist editors and professors and politicians who suppress debate on the record and
doctrines of Islam are among the chief culprits of India's communal conflagrations. [2] The BJP is
making a grave mistake by actively and passively joining the "secular" (in Europe we would call it
anti-secular) effort to shield Islam from rational investigation and informed debate. Instead, it
should make and support every effort to expose Islam and break the spell it has cast on hundreds of
millions of fellow Indians now known as Muslims.

Today, the liberation of the Muslims from Islam should be a top priority for all those who care
about India's and the world's future. This is all the more obvious when we notice that in the Muslim
world itself, many writers have stood up to publicize their break with Islam, and to show their
brethren the way out of the religion which was forced on them by Mohammed and his companions.
Some have done so from a newfound atheist conviction (e.g. Taslima Nasrin), others from a
rediscovery of the ancient ever-young spirituality of the Yedic tradition (e.g. Anwar Shaykh). Given
the intolerance for dissident opinions in the Muslim world, and given the actual spate of murders
and murder attempts against fellow dissidents, each one of these apostates has had to muster far
more courage than Sangh Parivar people will need when they finally speak up against Islam in the
relative safety and freedom of secular India.

The case against Islam is not limited to its record of intolerance, aggression, persecution and
barbarity. Quite apart from its violent self-righteousness and its anti-national attitudes, Islam is
reprehensible for the more fundamental and more universal reason that it is not true. Most ancient
religious traditions are not based on belief systems, e.g. though the theory of reincarnation has
gained widespread popularity among Hindus, there is no law which excludes non-believers in
reincarnation from the Hindu fold. Religions like Shinto or Taoism consist in a set of practices and
ritual or ethical conventions, established as a practical framework of life within which people can
exercise their freedom to seek spiritual upliftment; they are not based on a belief system. In contrast
to these ancient communal religions, Christianity and Islam make a truth claim which is non-
pro vable but must nonetheless be accepted and will be enforced with grim punishments in this
world and the next. [3] It is meaningless to talk about these creedal religions without evaluating their
central truth claims.

In the case of Islam, this creed is quite simple: There is no god except Allah, and Mohammed is the
prophet of Allah. The first part may or may not be true, depending on the meaning of the terms.
Like the Vaishnava term Bhagwan, "the sharer", effectively "the Lord", the Pagan-Arab term Allah
(from al-Ilah, "the god", cfr. Hebrew Eloha/Elohim) seems to have been an inclusive term,
subsuming every god in the Arab pantheon. But to read this meaning into the Islamic creed would
be unhistorical: the whole of Islamic scripture is entirely consistent in denouncing the worship of
any "other god" (or what a Vaishnava inclusive-monotheist might call: "God under any other
name") as irreconcilable with the worship of Allah. [4] It necessarily implies hostility to Hinduism as
long as Hindus do not worship Allah to the exclusion of all the Hindu gods and to the exclusion of
non-theistic worldviews.

The second part of the Shahada, that Mohammed is Allah's prophet (assuming that Allah is the
almighty Creator of the world), is decidedly untrue. First of all, it is entirely unproven. Every single
sentence in the Quran can be explained from Mohammed's own socio -cultural background, like any
perfecdy human product. Someone rich ought to announce an award for anyone who can find in
the Quran a single sentence which proves by its contents that the Almighty had dictated it. That is
what rationalist associations do to expose quack exponents of the paranormal: award a hundred
thousand dollars for whomever can demonstrate even a single paranormal fact under foolproof
conditions (so far, no one ever collected the prize).

Allah is supposed to be omniscient. For such a Being it should be very easy to demonstrate some
knowledge which is beyond the reach of ordinary human beings like Mohammed, say, being able in
620 AD to predict the events of 2000 AD, or to give the then-unknown chemical formula of water,
or to write a then-unknown language including modern Arabic. This would not be proof of
omniscience yet, but at least proof that the Quran is not the handiwork of an ordinary mortal; but
nothing of the sort is done in the Quran. Moreover, the Quran contains many contradictions and
inaccuracies, both in terms of modern physical and medical knowledge and in terms of its
references to Biblical characters and events, e.g. mistaking Moses' sister Miriam for Jesus' mother
Miriam/Mary, though there is a time-gap of more than twelve centuries between the two. The
omniscient Allah, who claims to be the God of Abraham and Moses, had somehow forgotten the
details of his interactions with the Hebrew prophets, and while confidently predicting the

Doomsday, He was ignorant of the scientific knowledge accumulated by mankind centuries before
this Doomsday.

Mohammed's own contemporaries were almost unanimous in dismissing his "revelations" as
anything but divine, though they disagreed on whether his problem was demonic possession (as is
still taught by some Christian missionaries) or just his imagination mn wild. Modern scholars have
analyzed Mohammed's behaviour and "revelations" as typical symptoms of paranoia, while Swami
Vivekananda opined that Mohammed suffered from the neuropathological effects of unguided
yogic experiments. [5] At any rate, there is nothing God-given about the Quranic revelation.

Islam stands or falls with Mohammed's prophethood. The entire Muslim law is based on it through
its four pillars, either direcdy (Quran and Hadis, the lore about his model behaviour) or indirectly
(Qiyas, or analogy of new situations with those in which Mohammed showed the way, and Ijma, the
consensus of men well-versed in the former three). Those who are now Muslims will be free to
replace Sharia laws with more humane laws once they emancipate themselves from their veneration
for the man on whose words and acts the Sharia is based. Then alone will they be able in good
conscience to drop their hostility to Hinduism. Moreover, then they themselves will opt for a
Common Civil Code, and they themselves will turn the Kashi and Mathura mosques into temples of
Shiva and Krishna, rather than have these changes forced on them by meddlesome Hindus. So, the
Hindutva activists should replace the Common Civil Code and temple agitations, which claim
things from the Muslims, with a campaign to reclaim the Muslims themselves, or at least to
emancipate them from the grip of Islamic doctrine and leave them free to choose a more humane
spiritual path for themselves.

[1] The victims of the Pakistani repression in East Bengal in 1971 (of whom the big majority were
Hindus, while the Bengali Muslims too were killed for anti-Hindu reasons, viz. for being "half-
Hindu renegades"), like those of the Sultanate and Moghul regimes, have never been properly
counted; careerwise, it is suicidal for a scholar to calculate the magnitude of Islam's crimes against
humanity. The figure of 3 million is probably too high, but as it was given by a Muslim secularist
(Bangladesh founder Mujibur Rahman), and as the secularists themselves have thrown their full
weight against a proper study of the magnitude of Islamic massacres of Hindus, they cannot fault us
for provisionally sticking to it.

[2] You wouldn't guess it from their polished convent-school English, their trendy terminology, or
their sanctimoniousness, but the likes of Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib or Gyanendra Pandey have
blood on their hands. The wave of Muslim violence after the Ayodhya demolition (and the
boomerang of police repression and Shiv Sena retaliation) was at least pardy due to the
disinformation by supposed experts who denied that the disputed building had a violent
iconoclastic prehistory, and implied that Hindus can get away with concocted history in their attacks
on innocent mosques. This disinformation gave Muslim militants the sense of justification needed
to mount a "revenge" operation and to mobilize decent Muslims for acts of violence which they
never would have committed if they had known the truth about Islam's guilt in Ayodhya.

[3] In this context, I want to caution against the imprecise use of the term "Semitic" when referring
to the Prophetic-monotheistic religions. Apart from being tainted by the related term "anti-Semitic",

it is also hopelessly inaccurate. Judaism (which is linguistically "Semitic" in that its basic texts are in
Hebrew and Aramaic) is a communal religion just like Hinduism and most tribal and traditional
religions, not a creedal one like Christianity and Islam. The Semitic peoples including the Arabs
until the 7th century AD and the early Israelites were heathens worshipping goddesses in sacred
groves and the like. The founding texts of Christianity were written in Greek, a non-Semitic
language. Monotheism was brought into Judaism by Moses, culturally an Egyptian, and had already
been briefly imposed on the Egyptians by Pharaoh Ekhnaton.

[4] Allah is given "one hundred names", or rather Arabic epithets, but this does not mean that Isis
or Apollo or Shiva will do just as well. The non-Quranic Persian god-name Khuda did admitteldly
manage to sneak into Muslim parlance; but it is no coincidence that with the increasing grip of the
theologians on public life in Iran and Pakistan, this term is being phased out in favour of "Allah",
e.g. Khuda hafiz, "God preserve you" (for "goodbye") is being replaced on Pakistani television by
Allah hafiz.

[5] See Swami Vivekananda: Complete Works, vol.l, p.184. The psychopathological thesis on
Mohammed has been developed in great detail by Dr. Herman Somers: Een and ere Mohammed
(Dutch; Hadewijch, Antwerp 1992).

21. Know the truth, and the truth
shall make you free

The struggle against Islamic aggression cannot be won without taking issue with the basic doctrines
of Islam, i.e. explaining to the Muslims that they have no reason to stay with the refuted dogmas of
Islam. The same is true for Christianity. The Sangh Parivar has made much ado about the Christian
demand for reservations for "Christian Dalits", and about continuing Christian proselytization in
tribal areas. It is, however, impossible to sustain this objection against the strategies of
evangelization as long as Christianity is accepted as a valid religion qualified to enjoy the Hindus'
sarva-dharma-samabhava. Why in the world should Indian citizens not embrace Christianity if it is
true, at least "equally true" with Hinduism? Especially now that Christianity in India has largely
"indianized" itself in its cultural expressions (e.g. by giving Hindu first names to their children), the
Sangh should not object to conversions to Christianity.

Being a Christian implies accepting a creed, i.e. an unprovable truth claim. The Christian
denominations differ on some points of detail, but crucial to any criterion for being a Christian is
the acceptance of the following item of belief: Jesus was the Christ/Messiah and saved mankind
from original sin through his death and resurrection. To my knowledge, all denominations with
active missions in India also teach that Jesus Christ was God's only-begotten son, both human and
divine in nature. [1] However, modern Bible scholarship, much of it carried out by Christians, has
conclusively refuted all the Christian fairy-tales about Jesus. [2] For example:

* Contrary to his own self-image, Jesus was not the messiah in the original sense of the term, i.e. a
scion of King David's clan who restores the Davidic kingdom. He never scored any political or
military victory for his country, and by the end of his career, Israel was still under foreign
domination. For all we know, Jesus did not even belong to the House of David; if he did, it is a
mystery why the evangelists had to indulge in such demonstrably false and contradictory stories
about Jesus' genealogy and birth.

* Jesus was not executed by the Jews but by the Romans because of his entirely hollow but strictiy
speaking seditious claim that he was the "messiah", i.e. the new king of the Jews, intrinsically a
challenge to Roman rule in his country (but not an act of blasphemy liable to the death sentence
under Jewish law, as wrongly alleged in the Gospel). The Gospel version that the Jews wanted him
dead (when in fact they merely held him in contempt as a useless and self-centred eccentric) was
invented when the Christians tried to be on the winning side during the Roman crackdown on the
Jewish revolt of ca. 70 AD. This move set the trend of two millennia of Church opportunism and it
off-hand initiated Christian antisemitism with its numerous pogroms culminating in the Holocaust.

* Jesus was not the messiah in the Christian-theological sense, i.e. the redeemer of mankind from
original sin and from its punishments (as per Genesis), viz. mortality, the need to work, and painful

childbirth. Anyone can see that people have gone on sinning, giving birth in agony, eating the fruit
of their labour in the sweat of their brows, and dying; just like they did before Jesus.

* Jesus was not resurrected, for if he had really "conquered death", he would still be with us. The
apostles tried to get around this simple logic by inventing his direct ascension to heaven, an
imaginary event totally incoherent with the whole narrative, rendered necessary only by the fact that
Jesus proved mortal like the rest of us. Fact is that the stories about the resurrection in the Gospels
are full of contradictions and absurdities, like most of the theologically cmcial episodes.

* Jesus was not God's only-begotten son, and for all his megalomania, he never even claimed to be
that. The whole notion is a mix-up of the worst in Hebrew monotheism (exclusivism) and Greek
paganism (idolizing of human beings as divine), and is absurd from the viewpoint of both these
traditions in their pure forms. Like the crucifixion, it was "a scandal to Jews, a nonsense to Greeks",
and an invention of the Church Fathers. [3]

* Jesus was not even a prophet, in the sense of being able to predict the future. Like his follower
Paul, he predicted the impending end of the world (even within the lifetime of his listeners),— surely
a failed prophecy.

* Jesus' ethics were mosdy not his, but included classical Jewish lore ("love thy neighbour") and
general proverbs ("to him who hath, shall be given"). Some of "his" words were put into his mouth
retrospectively by the evangelists, e.g. "Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's", a diplomatic kowtow to
the Romans. The words which he really spoke himself are either not original or not commendable.
Thus, the humane doctrine of the relativity of the Law (i.e. that the need to save a human life can
overrule a commandment), always presented as a revolutionary innovation, was taught by the very
Pharisees against whom Jesus is reported to have preached this doctrine. As against the Pharisees'
balanced view of the Law, Jesus vacillated between a pseudo-noble but inhuman hyper-adherence
to the law ("even a man who mentally lusts after a woman is guilty of adultery") and a nihilistic
dismissal of the Law and even of sheer common sense as having become irrelevant in view of the
impending Doomsday ("don't plan for the morrow", like the lilies in the field). Jesus' original
contribution lies mostly in the least commendable injunctions, e.g. in his very un -Jewish anti-family
and anti-sexuality statements, in the commandment of surrender to the aggressor ("when slapped,
turn the other cheek"), and in the morbid Sermon on the Mount ("the meek shall inherit the
earth"), which teaches the weak to exult in their weakness instead of exhorting them to become
strong.

This was merely a brief survey of the case against Christianity, but Hindutva activists who are
serious about countering Christian subversion ought to fa mili arize themselves more throughly with
these findings. Similarly, the case against Islam as marshalled in a number of quality books is
required reading for anyone who prefers India not to become an Islamic state. [4] Hindus may
rightly feel more drawn to critiques of Christianity and Islam from a spiritual viewpoint, as those by
Ram Swarup, than to purely rationalistic critiques; yet, I feel that taking cognizance of the latter's
very thorough and comprehensive analysis of these religions would certainly be worth the effort.
After properly digesting the hard scholarly facts, they may add something which most scholars may

be unaware of, and which Hinduism offers: a comprehensive vision which allows for a meaningful
type of ritual and spiritual practice to continue after the creedal religions have been discarded.

If the Sangh is serious about saving Hinduism, it should make sure that from now on, no one can
get away with pious nonsense like Jesus' Resurrection or Quranic Revelation. Every time a wily
secularist or sentimental Ramakrishnaist stands up to praise Jesus or Mohammed, every time an
Indian President or Minister opens a Christian or Islamic function with the injunction that "we
should all put Jesus' (c.q. Mohammed's) message of peace and tolerance into practice", Hindus
should push the facts under his nose.

[1] One of the most bizarre disputes in religious history is the fragmentation of the early Church in
sects divided by their doctrines concerning the nature of Jesus. Some "heresies" marginally
surviving in the Middle East teach that Jesus was but a non-divine human being, others that he was
exclusively divine and not human, but the mainstream (after bloody persecutions of the others)
decided that Jesus had two natures, divine and human.

[2] For a start, I suggest all the Hindutva workers dealing with Christian missionaries read Michael
Arnheim's excellent book Is Christianity True? (Duckworth, London 1984), and of course the Voice
of India publications on Christianity.

[3] According to the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, the source of the Indian Church's claim that the
apostle Thomas came to India and was martyred near Chennai, Thomas was Jesus' twin-brother,
which ought to create a problem for the dogma of the "only-begotten son".

[4] A truly great book in this class, written by a born Muslim, is Ibn Warraq: Why I Am Not a
Muslim(Prometheus, New York 1995).

22. Hindu objections

A Hindu policy of ideological confrontation with hostile religions is necessary for the survival of
India as an essentially Hindu country. After having flattered Christianity and Islam for several
centuries, Hindus inside and outside the Sangh may come up with many objections against such a
policy. As a BJP man once told me: "When we attack Christianity, it is not the Christians who leave
us — they are not with us anyway — , it is the Hindus who won't vote for us." This much is certainly
true, that the rotten sentimentalism of "equal truth of all religions" has gone fairly deep into the
Hindu psyche. Before explaining anything to Christians and Muslims, the true story must be
explained to Hindus, whose obstinate self-deception is the greatest obstacle to Hindu liberation.
While Muslims consider it only logical that non-Muslims disbelieve Islam's defining dogmas,

Hindus can get quite indignant when someone dares to say that the Islamic creed is wrong (more
than when he scolds and ridicules Hinduism).

One argument reluctant Hindus will come up with, is that it is pretentious to tell other people that
they are wrong, as if any of us has a monopoly on the tmth. This is a case of Hindus getting angry
at the sliver in their own eye but ignoring the beam in the enemy's eye. It is not Hinduism but Islam
and Christianity which have started the game of telling others that they are wrong. If Hindus must
enter this confrontation, it is because the confrontation is already taking place, though with only
one side actually fighting.

The meaning of: "There is no God except Allah", is precisely that all Hindus and all other non-
Muslims are wrong when they worship Shiva or Amon-Ra or Wodan. Actually, it goes much farther
than that: its full doctrinal implication is that those who worship any other God (or no God at all)
are doomed: doomed to servility and rightlessness in this world and eternal hellfire in the next. By
contrast, critics of Islam merely assert that believers in Islam are mistaken, without any further ado.
The ancient believers in a flat earth were mistaken too, yet they are not suffering in hell for that.
Erring is human, the fact of being proven wrong does not give your critics the right to take your
property, to enslave you, to deny you full citizenship or public display of your religion. Muslims
should not be punished for being deluded about Mohammed's megalomaniacal claims (the way
their religion wants to punish us with jihad and hellfire for not sharing this delusion), they should
on the contrary be helped to make a new start.

Hindus are mistaken when they assume that proving someone wrong implies a claim to final truth.
Look at it with the eyes of science. It is a fact that responsible scientists will hesitate to declare a
theory to be absolutely true. Thus, Newton's mechanics seemed to be fully proven, and it was, but
only for objects moving at moderate speed. Once objects moving at extremely high speeds were
taken into account, the theory broke down and a more sophisticated theory was required, viz.
Einstein's relativity theory. This way, with every broadening of our horizon, even the most well-
proven theory may ultimately be shown to be deficient. Instead of achieving truth, we merely create
milestones of better theories on the way to an ever-distant goal of absolute scientific truth, possibly
an unreachable goal which we can only approximate asymptotically. The exotic world of quantum

physics has even discovered phenomena which cannot be adequately described by one theory, but
need two seemingly contradictory theories to describe their behaviour (as wave or as particle).
Granted, the notion of objective truth has become more complex and more elusive than optimistic
but naive Enlightenment philosophers thought. [1]

And yet, no matter how cautious and even relativistic philosophers of science have become vis-a-vis
the truth claims of science, they still take for granted that we can prove a theory wrong, definitively
wrong. The theory that dewdrops are tears fallen from the moon cannot withstand empirical tests.
To assert that water when heated becomes ice, would be wrong; it would not just be "different" or
"differently valid", but downright wrong, definitively disproven. In mathematics, certain equations
can be formulated for which there is no solution, or several solutions at the same time, but all the
same, the equation "2 + 2 = 3" is and remains unambiguously wrong. Eventhough the search for
the truth will go on for a long time to come, any truth claims proven wrong can now already be
discarded. Rightness may be elusive, but wrongness is quite straightforward. I may hesitate to
pronounce an opinion on whether Vedanta is right, but I can now already say that the defining truth
claims of Christian and Islamic doctrine stand disproven.

Christianity and Islam are wrong in their central truth claims and can immediately be discarded.
Humanity has lived without these pretentious doctrines for long, and it is a matter of mathematical
certainty that it will resume doing so. The question is only how much damage they will be allowed
to add to their record before expiring.

Gandhi used to compare Hinduism and Islam with an older and a younger brother, respectively.

His effective interpretation of this simile was that the older brother should passively suffer any
whim of the younger brother, which is neither realistic nor educationally advisable. The simile is
alright, but its realistic implication is that the older brother should help the younger brother to
outgrow his childish ways. If he has wisdom and fellow-feeling, he will take into consideration the
difficulties attending all transition processes. This leads to a somewhat nobler kind of objection
which I expect some Hindus to raise: think of the complete revolution which de-islamization or de-
christianization will mean for the people concerned! With their commendable conservatism, Hindus
are wary of the damage which revolutions tend to cause.

Jesus and Mohammed and their front soldiers never cared much about the upheaval and destruction
they wrought; but we need not stoop to their level. As much as possible, the emancipation of
Muslims and Christians from their belief systems should be an evolutionary rather than a
revolutionary process. First of all, most customs and rituals and other externals need not be
tampered with, for they are not what makes these religions objectionable. Ex-Catholics can
continue to venerate the Madonna, who is but a christianized version of Isis with babe Horus (and
similar mother-goddesses) anyway. Ex-Muslims can continue to pray five times a day, to watch their
handpalms while praying, to go on pilgrimage to Mecca (a pre-islamic institution) [2], to fast for a
month per year (preferably fixed in early spring) [3], and to wear goat-beards. These customs are as
good as any other. It should be made clear to them that Hinduism has room for these customs and
rituals, that its objection is only to God's Only-Begotten Son and Allah's Final Prophet. All they
have to do is get rid of Jesus and Mohammed, and the communal problem will disappear.

Many people have argued that Muslims cannot convert to Hinduism because no one will want to
marry their children: for Muslims, they are apostates, and for Hindus, the fact that they have
declared themselves converts to Hinduism does not make them members of the appropriate caste.
Christian missionaries used to have this problem in reverse when they tried to lure individual
Hindus into Christianity. Their solution was to convert entire communities within a short time, so
that people could go on intermarrying within their own community after conversion. To the extent
that caste endogamy persists, this is indeed the most practical solution; both the Arya Samaj and the
VHP claim to have achieved several communal conversions of this type. [4]

With the modern media and modern education, it should not be difficult to reach the Muslims and
Christians by the mi lli ons. Once the exodus has started, every emigrant from the faith will persuade
his friends and relatives, and it will become a mass movement, bringing across whole communities.
In fact, now already there is a high number of nominal Muslims who have become skeptical of the
claims of Islam, but who think it wiser in the circumstances to keep quiet about their convictions.
Ultimately it is they themselves who have to break free, but Hindus can certainly help in creating
the proper climate.

In spite of all the sensitivity which you can bring to this, a certain amount of shock will remain
unavoidable when Muslims or Christians come to realize that they have believed in fairy-tales for all
these years. Imagine you are a mullah, highly specialized in Sharia jurisprudence, and suddenly you
realize that this whole Sharia is based on the "model behaviour" of an unimportant individual who
lived in a distant country long ago, and whose knowledge was far too limited to guide us in the
problems which we are facing today, even apart from the mental problem which further distorted
his already limited vision. Your status suddenly cmmbles, you feel like you have wasted the best
years of your life, you come down to earth and you have to start from scratch. It is like the situation
of professors of Marxism-Leninism in the former Soviet Bloc, who in 1 989 found that their
knowledge had become totally useless overnight.

Dr. Herman Somers, the Flemish ex-Jesuit who made a psychopathological analysis of both Jesus
and Mohammed, relates how he discovered through his pioneering Bible studies that "Christianity
was a mistake". [5] It was a painful process to realize that he had wasted so much time on Christian
theology, a purely imaginary science, and that he had sacrificed so much to his commitments as a
Jesuit. At the same time, it was a liberation, which had come "better late than never". Millions of
people in Europe can testify that outgrowing Christian beliefs has been a liberation.

I am afraid I sound like a Christian missionary when I say that we should help Muslims and
Christians out of their religions because we love them. The expression sounds patronizing, but
there is nothing I can do about it: the insight in the wrongness of the Christian and Islamic dogmas
just happens to be a more advanced stage of knowledge than the belief in their rightness. Therefore,
we help Christians and Muslims on the way forwards when we make them questions the dogmas of
their religion. The unbelievers are the elder brother, the believers the younger brother. And it does
show concern and love for our fellow-men when we help them to outgrow their delusions.

What, then, is the difference with Francis Xavier who came to free the Indian Pagans from

Hinduism "because he loved them so much" (as Catholic story-books claim)? If we make
abstraction from the violent methods which Francis Xavier used and which I reckon Hindus will
never resort to, we may concede that subjectively, it is the same thing: he thought he was doing
something good for the Hindus when he converted them to Christianity. But objectively, the cmcial
difference remains that he converted them into a delusion, while Dr. Somers (through his
demythologizing books) has converted people out of a delusion.

Here again, we find that the question of truth cannot be avoided. It makes little sense to discuss
relations with Christianity and Islam without evaluating their truth claims. When their propagandists
brandish the values with which superficial Hindus have identified them (charity and egalitarian
brotherhood, respectively), we can readily concede the desirability of these values, but we must
point out that these values do not add up to being a Christian or a Muslim; for that, assent to the
dogmas is necessary. Charity and brotherhood have been in existence for a long time, and we need
not fear for their disappearance when the last believers free themselves from the religions which
falsely claim these virtues as their very own contribution. No matter how laudable charity is, that
does not make Jesus Christ the Messiah. No matter how badly Hindus need an increased sense of
brotherhood, that does not make the Quran a divine revelation. Another objection could be that
religion, any religion, is bound up with ethics, and that people will lose their ethics once they lose
their religion. In my lifetime I've heard this argument used any number of times in defence of
Christianity, yet the ex-Christians who make up the majority of my generation in my country are
generally not worse people than their Christian grandparents were. Yet, to support this argument,
people in India as well as in Muslim countries are sure to point to the West as a resounding
illustration of the kind of decadence which inevitably follows the loss of religion. It is true that
many people have been freed from their Christian inhibitions only to dive deeply into hedonism
and consumerism, and that some lost souls in the cities have abandoned their civic sense, their
respect for life and property, and their sexual morality along with their Christian beliefs. If anyone
should be blamed for this, we should not forget the responsibility of Christian clerics who have
propagated the notion that Christianity and morality are equivalent (the identification of their new
Christian belief with age-old values being a trick to give Christianity more respectability among
prospective converts) [6], and that fear of punishment in the hereafter is the only way to keep people
on the right path.

The challenge before responsible people in regions where people lose the faith in large numbers, is
to guide the masses in rediscovering their natural religiosity and their natural sense of ethics, to
rebuild what Christianity has destroyed but was unable to replace in the long run. To quite an
extent, this is already happening, and it goes without saying that Asian religions (Hinduism,
Buddhism and Taoism) are providing the main though not the only guiding light. The loss of belief
in Christ or Mohammed does not mean the loss of the religious feeling, on the contrary. Indeed, the
often rationalist argumentation of the Arya Samaj's shuddhi activists was never meant to free
Muslims and Christians from religion altogether, but to make them more accessible for the Vedic
message. Yes, there is life after Christianity and Islam, even an ethical and religious life. In the West
right now, there is a tremendous religious seeking, people groping in the dark but usually ending up
with the great traditions from Asia in a suitably adapted form.

In the case of Indian Muslims and Christians, such a development would be entirely logical, though
I can imagine that many Muslims who see themselves as the progeny of Central-Asian conquerors
would opt for alternatives to mainstream Hinduism, such as Buddhism or Zoroastrianism (both of
which are going through a remarkable revival in the Altaic-speaking and Iranian-speaking parts of
the former Soviet Union). That is quite alright, for what is needed is a struggle for religious freedom
against dogmatic belief systems; not trying to pull them into your own shop but encouraging them
to find out for themselves.

A very optimistic objection could be that Hindu society need not bother about Christianity and
Islam, because the thrust of their historical aggression against Hinduism is weakening and will
weaken further in the future. It has happened before: while Communists were plotting the death of
Hinduism and the dismemberment of India, the Hindutva movement did very little to counter
Communism, yet Communism collapsed under its own failures in its very stronghold. Christianity
has suffered major losses in America and staggering losses in Europe, and even Islam which now
seems such a formidable steamroller may be undermined by emerging freethinkers from among its
own ranks. One day, Hindus may wake up and find that the missionaries have left, the petrodollars
gone, the mosques turned into goshalas, who knows?

Unfortunately, luck does not usually come to those who count on luck to save them. The
circumstances in South Asia, barring a Hindu awakening, are quite encouraging for anti-Hindu
predators. As the late Girilal Jain once told me, "nothing ever dies in India", and I could well
imagine a situation of Islam and Christianity dying out in their homelands while thriving in India
(cfr. Communism which is more alive in Calcutta and JNU than in Beijing let alone Moscow). Of
course, the ultimate disappearance of untenable belief systems is a mathematical certainty, but
before they go, they can still do tremendous damage to the continuity of Hindu tradition. Look at
Nepal, till recently entirely Hindu-Buddhist, and how Islamic infiltrators and Christian missionaries
are fast changing the religious landscape there.

In Hindutva publications, I read triumphal reports about Hindu reconversions in tribal areas, but to
me they sound like the blustering triumphalism of the Marathas before the battle of Panipat.

Indeed, other people working in tribal areas tell me that the Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram and like-
minded initiatives, in spite of their sincere and commendable efforts, just can't compete with the
well-organized and heavily financed Christian missions. The Organiser itself recendy carried a
headline: "Conversion assumes alarming proportions". [7] Whatever their problems in the West, the
missionaries can still do tremendous damage to the continuity of Hindu tradition and to the fabric
of the Indian state.

Some people object that what we need is not the conversion of Muslims and Christians to a native
religion, but simply the dilution of their fanaticism. They point to a few Christian theologians who
follow the vogue in certain Western theological faculties, which is to assert that all religions are part
of God's salvation plan. In practice: let's leave them to their deluded faith in imaginary divine
revelations and only-begotten sons, as long as they stop attacking us.

First of all, I have my doubts about the acceptance of these deluded faiths, even if they are not

immediately harmful to third parties. Though the Bahai sect is not persecuting people, the belief in
the Mohammed-like pretensions of its founders (along with the continued belief in Jesus' and
Mohammed's prophethood) remains a profoundly sad mistake, one in which I cannot want my
fellow-men to remain entrapped. In the Yedic phrase, "let us ennoble the world", let us not leave
areas of darkness shielded off against the light.

Secondly, I do not see much of this softening in the Indian chapters of Christianity and Islam.
Apologists like Rafiq Zakaria and Asghar Ali Engineer like to present a human face of Islam, but
they do so simply by lying and by concealing and denying the hard facts of Islamic Scripture and
history; they never make any concession or show any sympthy for other religions and for the plight
of the persecuted Hindus in Islamic states and provinces. Even those few Muslims who are
sincerely trying to redefine Islam as a tolerant faith carry no conviction: their tolerant version of
Islam can never be more than an unstable transitory phase, either out of Islam altogether or back
towards the genuine intolerant Islam.

Among Christians, the trend towards genuine religious pluralism does exist, but in India it concerns
only a microscopic minority. I have heard Swayamsevaks assert that the Christians in South India
have become much less hostile, "for they are now giving Hindu first names to their children". But
with my inside contacts and my close watch on Christian media and scholarship, I know for fact
that this change in fashion does not represent a change of heart. For a first test, how many
Christians who have named their children Rama or Sita have supported the Ayodhya temple
movement? The historical fact that their ancestors enjoyed the hospitality of the Hindus (as against
the persecution by rival Christian sects in the Roman Empire and by the Mazdean state religion in
Iran) only makes their animosity against Hindus more bitter; people tend to hate those to whom
they owe a debt. Moreover, even if we assume that dilution of Christianity and Islam down to a
non-offensive level of commitment is the desirable goal, history testifies that this goal has been
reached in Europe through a frontal attack on Christianity itself. It is no coincidence that
Christianity has mellowed in the last two centuries just when it was put to scrutiny by scholars and
driven from its political and educational power positions by secularists (in the genuine sense).

If you flatter Islam, saying that it is a religion of peace and brotherhood, this will not cure the
believers of their self-righteousness; rather, it will make them ask why you aren't becoming a
Muslim yourself. But if you expose Islam, saying that it is a deluded belief and intrinsically fanatical,
it will make apologists search the Quran for verses dimly alluding to tolerance, it will make them
write textbooks mendaciously proclaiming that Islam has always been tolerant and for all their
dishonesty, they will thereby implicidy be extolling the virtue of tolerance. This is indeed what we
do see happening with apologists like Wahiduddin Khan, Rafiq Zakaria or Asghar Ali Engineer:
even a small amount of writing about Islamic fanaticism by Western scholars and journalists (while
in those circles too, flattery of Islam is the fashion) has sent them looking for proof that Islam is
tolerant. If you are satisfied with mellowing Islam down, you have every reason to join the project
of a fundamental and uncompromising criticism of Islamic doctrine and history.

A more or less valid objection is that challenging the truth claims of Islam and Christianity will
provoke polemical attacks on Hinduism and (even worse) genuine doubts among Hindus about

their own religion. However, the anti-Hindu polemic is already there, Christian missionaries have
been very active at it ever since their arrival, and secularists and Muslims have started their own
variety since a few decades; on that count, Hindus already have nothing to lose. But I do admit that
a critical look at other religions may feel uncomfortable for Hindus who are not used to critical
thought. If Mohammed who heard a voice from heaven was just hallucinating, what shall we say
about some of the bhakti saints who dressed up like women to be united with the divine lover
Krishna, or who would hang in trees monkey-like to impersonate Hanuman?

Hindu tradition is based on the experience of sages, sane men and women who observed the world
and explored consciousness. As the Hindu Renaissance spokesmen were fond of asserting, its basis
is scientific. This does not mean that it is related to the latest scientific theories in physics, many of
which are bound to be superseded by new theories, nor that the Vedas contain descriptions of
modern machines, as imaginative writers have tried to prove. [8] It means that its approach is
scientific: the Vedic truths are verifiable, universal and repeatable, not dependent on the views of
privileged individuals ("prophets") but apaurusheya, "impersonal".

Hindus should get serious about the Constitutional injunction to "develop the scientific temper",
one of the few truly Hindu elements in the secular Constitution. If that means that some of the
superstitious deadwood which Hinduism has accumulated over the centuries is doomed to fall by
the wayside, so much the better. The scientific oudook is deadly to the core beliefs of Islam and
Christianity, but Hindus should welcome it as a somewhat neglected pillar of their own tradition
whose time has come once more. It is not impossible that mentally afflicted individuals have been
attracted to the religious role, particularly in the exaltation-prone Bhakti movement, and that the
talented ones among them have acquired some fame as poets, but this does not affect the
mainstream of Sanatana Dharma, which is not dependent on any one individual authority.

Very imperfect individuals can find a meaningful place for themselves in this tradition, but to assess
the value of this tradition it must be considered in its entirety, not just the viewpoints of individual
poets or gurus. This ought to be an occasion to address one of the most serious problems afflicting
contemporary Hinduism: sectarianism. One of the additional reasons why many Hindus including
these travelling salesmen of enlightenment whom we get to see in the West do not call themselves
Hindu, is that their knowledge horizon does not go beyond the teachings of their own guru. It is
high time that the teaching of Hinduism is reoriented to a comprehensive view of the tradition.

Some BJP men argue that it is not the task of a political party to wage an ideological struggle. I
wonder what the Communists would say about that. At any rate, the Sangh is a family, a house with
many mansions, and it certainly has an appropriate department for this kind of work. Indeed, the
VHP now already claims to do just this kind of work, viz. to reconvert Muslim communities which
have not lost touch with their Hindu heritage entirely. Some people even within the Sangh are
privately expressing doubts about these conversions, doubts which are aggravated by the lack of
reliable record-keeping; for all its omnipresence, the Sangh and its affiliates are totally unable to
provide facts and figures about conversions into and out of Hinduism.

Apart from the conversion business, facing and speaking the tmth about hostile religions is most of
all an urgent necessity within Hindu activist circles. The BJP and every Sangh-affiliated
organizations has ideological training sessions for its own cadres, and it is there, rather than in face-
to-face talks with the minorities, that the servile flattery of Islam and Christianity has to be flushed
out first. It is inside the BJP office, with no Muslim or secularist listening, that I heard BJP
"ideologues" repeat the worn-out Congress lies about the British being guilty of pitting Islam
against Hinduism. The present situation is not — as secularist media routinely allege — that Hindus
among themselves are facing the truth about these predatory religions, only to flatter them in public
out of tactical calculations. The secularists suspect that the BJP's public virtue of professed
secularism hides a private vice of communalism, I have noticed many times that this public flattery
of Christianity and Islam is very much based on genuine convictions, on eager self-deception. At
this point, I am not asking the BJP to speak boldly to the Muslims and the secularists; for now, they
will be doing their duty if they stop deceiving their own cadres and voters.

At the same time, the BJP need not postpone a bolder stand longer than necessary. A look at the
standard practice among non-Hindus shows that there is nothing insupportable about a politician
publicly mocking a religion. In Belgium, it is not uncommon that socialist or liberal politicians
openly express their anti-Christian convictions, making jokes about Catholic superstitions, all while
sitting in coalition governments with the Christian-Democrats. The Muslims openly express their
adherence to Islam, a doctrine which is intrinsically hostile to Hinduism. They openly testify that
"there is no God but Allah", meaning that Hindus are all profoundly wrong. So what?

At this point, the BJP spokesman will come out with his trump objection: "But criticizing Islam is
dangerous! People have been murdered for doing just that!" This, I cannot deny. One of these
murders, that of Arya Samaj writer Pandit Lekh Ram, was the reason for British-imposed legal
curbs on the freedom to criticize Islam; after that, some Arya Samaj writers have been prosecuted
under these laws, others (most famously Swami Shraddhananda) have been murdered by Muslim
militants in the 1920s and 30s, to the applause of the whole Muslim clergy. Ever since, Arya Samaj
polemic against Islam has become muted, which proves the efficiency of terrorism. But then, even
in today's atmosphere of Hindu sarva-dharma-samabhava and Islamic arrogance, I slam- friendly
Hindu activists including BJP men are already being killed by Muslims, without any gain in return.
Swami Shraddhananda at least died for something, for the freedom of Hindus to liberate their
estranged countrymen by informing them of the truth about Islam; if the BJP abandons that right,
its martyrs have died in vain.

Moreover, the general opinion climate can be changed. Naguib Mahfouz has described how in his
young days, more than fifty years ago, Islam was seen by the Egyptian middle-class as a relic from
the past. People could openly mock Islamic beliefs, there was no question of being punished for
that. Since then, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction (after a near-mortal attack on his
person in 1994, Mahfouz himself had to go in hiding), but it will swing back. Hindus including BJP
men can contribute to this change of climate by defying the Emergency which Islam has clamped
on India, and by publicly breaking the taboo on criticism of Islam. It will be shocking to the first
speaker to hear himself utter unspeakable things like: "I reject the belief in Quranic revelation", but
with time and practice, it will become easier.

It should be kept in mind that ideological confrontation is the best and ultimately the only way to
prevent physical confrontation. A few hotheads may initially try to "punish" the questioning of
Islamic doctrine, but this is bound to remain a marginal problem. The really frightening prospect is
the huge riots and the civil war which history has in store for India if the predatory religions are
allowed to grab even more of India's population and territory for themselves. Therefore, they have
to be exposed.

Ultimately, the tmth is unstoppable. Heliocentrism and other breakthroughs to modern science had
their martyrs, such as Giordano Bruno and, in a limited way, Galileo Galilei, but ultimately
geocentrism could not hold out against the intrinsic superiority of heliocentrism. Like snow before
sunshine, like darkness before dawn, dogmatic beliefs are bound to give way once they are exposed
to the light of reason — and of the Vedic vision.

[1] It is precisely this modest and mature view of truth which underlies Hindu pluralism. As David
Frawley has convincingly argued, the central value of Hinduism is not "tolerance" (as interested
parties try to make Hindus believe) but truth. Yet, this does not lead to the quasi-monotheistic
triumphalism and intolerance which characterizes 19th-century- type positivism (e.g. the ill-informed
condemnation of Ayurveda and other traditional forms of medicine by academic medicine), but to a
sensitive respect for different levels and expressions of truth.

[2] Of course, they should restore the proper direction of walking around the Kaaba. The Pagan
parikrama is made in the direction of the planetary motions, i.e. (in the northern hemisphere)
clockwise, but Mohammed reversed it in order to prove his non-Paganism. A side-effect is that in
contrast with the Pagans, Muslims point their left hand to the Kaaba, the one which they consider
unclean because they wipe their bottoms with it.

[3] Diet specialists advise early spring as the best time for fasting, and this was also the Christian
and Pagan-Arab custom (Ramadan /Ramzan was the ninth month in a solilunar year beginning ca. 1
July, roughly coinciding with March), but Mohammed jeopardized this healthy custom by tampering
with the calendar, so that the month of fasting can fall in midwinter of summer as well.

[4] It may of course be an occasion to rethink this practice. Anyway, who has the facts and figure
about caste discrimination among Hindutva activists in their private lives? Both they and their
enemies ought to be interested in these data.

[5] Dr. Somers' books are only available in Dutch, but a summary of his Bible analysis is given in K.
Elst: Psychology of Prophetism (Voice of India 1992). An English summary of his findings on
Mohammed is in preparation.

[6] In his Ten Commandments, Moses already plays this trick by juxtaposing his own innovations
(monotheism, aniconic cult, taboo on God's name) with long-established norms (respect for
parents, chastity etc.). The Quran too has many passages where belief in Mohammed's message is
mentioned in one breath with traditional virtues, as if there were a necessary connection between
the two. Naive preachers deduce from such passages that Mohammed had been the first to

propagate these virtues and that the Pagan Arabs were bereft of morality.

[7] Contributed by M.G. Vaidya, Organiser, 2 March 1997. It is significant that, as a close reader of
RSS publications since seven years, I have never come across any kind of report listing actual data
about gains and losses on the conversion front. Any modern organization going about such a
serious and large-scale project (e.g. the Christian missions) sets up fact-finding missions and an
information-gathering network so as to know exacdy what the challenges are and how the project is
faring; not so the saviours of Hinduism, who think they can do without this.

[8] All the same, it is relevant that Vedic seers were pioneers in the sciences of astronomy,
mathematics and linguistics, just as some Taoists contributed to physical science and technology, as
a consequence of their conviction that these domains of reality were pregnant with a transcendent
quality. This is much in contrast with Jesus and Mohammed and their companions, who had
nothing to offer to science except incomprehension and persecution.

23. Conclusion

In spite of Hinduism's nominal magnitude, the chance that Hinduism gets wiped out by its enemies
can no longer be discounted. More than ever, fortunes are spent on the war to destroy Hinduism in
favour of Islam or some suitably adapted variety of Christianity or Marxism. The hostile activities of
Islamic and Christian agitators and the attempts at Hindu demoralization and loss of Hindu self-
respect by the secularists are now compounded by a fast-spreading loss of Hindu memory at the
mass level by consumerism and Western pulp media. I have seen with my own eyes how local
cultures within European civilization are being as good as wiped out in a few decades by the
onslaught of mindless "Americanism", and this loss of cultural roots is a major factor in the current
defencelessness of the affected populations vis-a-vis the rising threat of Islam. Hindus would be
mistaken to think that this cannot happen to their old civilization; most civilizations at the time of
their demise were old and venerable. For Hinduism too, time is running out.

The seriousness of the situation should first of all concern the Hindus themselves. Come to think of
it, I have very lithe personal stake in the political success of Hindu revivalism and the continued
existence of Hinduism. Of course, there is an invaluable heritage contained in the Upanishads and
other Hindu books; but they are available in Western libraries, we can take from them what we like
without needing the help of a living Hindu. It was a comforting idea to know that at least one
ancient society had managed to preserve its traditions down to the present, but if that society fails
to defend itself and disappears, I am confident that we can find our way without it. If Sanskrit
scholarship or yogic expertise dies in India, I am sure some aficianados in the West will keep it alive
as a matter of antiquarian hobbyism, somewhat like the thriving clubs for amateurs long-dead
Pharaonic lore. It is always deplorable when a dinosaur dies, but we can survive the demise of
really-existing Hinduism without serious losses. Whether Hinduism will survive as a living
civilization in control of its own territory, or merely as a museum piece, is a vital concern only for
the Hindus themselves.

The issue is the survival of the besieged Hindu civilization. The stakes are high, and the question is
whether Hindus intend to go for the big one or settle for less. A general rule for this type of
situation is that if you aim high and put in an effort commensurate with the calibre of your goal,
you may achieve it. Even if you don't achieve it, you may still achieve a number of lesser objectives
as a spin-off of your effort. But if you aim low, your enthusiasm and hence your effort will be
proportionately limited, so the chance is a priori small that you will achieve anything more than
your limited goal. Further, your enemies will try to thwart your little efforts with as much zeal as
they would your big efforts, so you may still fail to achieve what you intended to. If the Hindu
movement continues to aim for petty gains and peripheral achievements, it will continue to fail in its
real task, and even the hoped-for petty successes may continue to elude it.

If the Hindutva politicians and activists want to spare themselves the prospect of going down in
history as a bunch of buffoons, who stood by and worked on inconsequential things while their
country was taken over by their mortal enemies, they will have to get their act together quickly.

Instead of wasting energy on petty politicking and limited goals such as the reconversion of sacred
sites, all eyes should be set on the major goal, which is the liberation of fellow Indians from the
predatory religions which have alienated them from their ancestral culture. The goal could in fact be
set even higher, so as to include among other things the emancipation of the West-Asians and the
liberation of the Kaaba (a temple to Hubal, the Arab Shiva) from Islam; but it will already be good
if the self-styled vanguard of Hindu society can save its own people and country.

There is nothing "fundamentalist" or "fascist" about this. The emancipation of fellow Indian from
closed creeds is a very humane and responsible project. It could best be summed up in the motto
with which the Muslim-born humanist Ibn Warraq opens his book Why I Am Not a Muslim: "The
best thing we can do for Muslims is to free them from Islam." More concretely, it is the only way to
avoid the extremely bloody conflagrations which are sure to break out if the Muslim and Christian
agitators smell victory in ever-larger sections of the country. As they smell blood, they will become
more openly and more fiercely aggressive and Hindus will not go down without a fight; the
subsequent loss of life should not be minimized as just one more of those inevitables in history.

The ideologies which pit believer against unbeliever should be neutralized before they can add some
more achievements to their ugly record.

As part of this great project, smaller projects such as a Common Civil Code or the restoration of
some Hindu sacred sites may be legitimate steps on the way, depending on the circumstances, and
even temporary compromises with the hostile forces may be justified in certain cases; but the final
goal should be kept uppermost in everyone's mind. In the case of the organized Hindutva
movement, there is reason to fear that amid all its campaigns for limited demands it has lost the
awareness of the larger challenge. Today, when you question Hindutva leaders and ideologues about
their puzzling policy of kowtowing before Mohammed and Nehru, the typical answer is that this is
all part of a very very clever strategy which you unfortunately haven't understood yet. Admittedly,
victorious strategists have often started out with seemingly self-defeating moves which their
underlings didn't understand but which produced the desired results in the long run. Let the
Hindutva spokesmen ask themselves if their own clever tricks have this calibre, and whether they
are really outwitting their enemies rather than themselves.

Appendix: A Reply to Kanchan
Gupta

On 14 and 15 January 1997, the Observer of Business and Politics published a reply by Kanchan
Gupta to my own two-part article, "BJP retreat on Ayodhya", on which the present booklet is
based. I do not know what Kanchan Gupta's exact relation with the BJP is; I have met him several
times at the BJP office and assume that he is a BJP supporter though not from an RSS background.
It deserves mention and praise that the article is polite and to the point, two qualities which are the
exception rather than the rule in communalism-related debates in India.

After summarizing my critique, he starts by telling the readers that "Mr. Elst's critique stems from a
certain sympathy, if not concern, for the BJP". This is and remains tme: I still believe that a BJP
Government would be a relatively good thing for India, and it makes me sad to see that a lot of
potential in the broader Hindu revivalist movement is wasted because of the ideological confusion
in the party which was meant to be its political spearhead.

Coming to my view on the BJP's hesitant and shifting stand on the Ayodhya issue, Mr. Gupta
suggests that it is "simplistic" and "based on rather superficial knowledge of actual events and
facts". So, for my benefit as well as that of the reader, he recapitulates the history of the Ayodhya
affair. He argues that from 1528 (construction of Babri Masjid) until after the opening of the
building for general worship of the idols in 1986, "the movement to regain Ram Janmabhoomi
from illegal Muslim occupation was nothing more than articulation of Hindu religious aspiration
and assertion of pious faith over blind zealotry". It became politicized after the 1986 court verdict
due to Muslim and secularist agitations against the full restoration of the Ram Janmabhoomi
temple: "It was then that the BJP stepped in and strengthened the movement by converting it into a
mass agitation aimed at reasserting the very ethos of Indian nationalism — hence the appeal to
Indians to choose between Babar the invader and Ram the national hero, to choose between a
monument to India's subjugation and a temple in honour of Indian nationhood."

I understand from this that Kanchan Gupta fully supports the rhetorical shift from a religious
Hindu-Muslim conflict to a conflict between nationalism and anti-national forces. Let me point out
that many Christian monuments, some of which have become "national" monuments as well, stand
on the destroyed pre-Christian places of worship of the nations concerned. Had Islam prevailed in
India, the Babri Masjid would stand as a national monument celebrating the Indian nation's
liberation from idolatry. Whether the Babri Masjid was national or anti-national entirely depends on
fate's choice between two religions: it is only as long as Hinduism prevails that the Babri Masjid
counts as an anti-national monument. Whichever way you turn it, the basic conflict remains one
between Hinduism and Islam, and twisting it to make it look like something else serves no good
purpose.

Kanchan Gupta has a valid point when he describes how the Muslim leadership had been
emboldened by its victory in the Shah Bano dispute, where it had made the Government change the
law to overrule a Supreme Court verdict disagreeable to the Islamic orthodoxy. It tried to repeat this
feat in the Ayodhya affair: force the Government to overrule the 1986 Court verdict opening the
disputed building for Hindu worship. "Perhaps they would have succeeded had not the BJP stepped
in and put Ayodhya first on its own and the nation's agenda. Suffice it to say, contrary to what Mr.
Elst claims, this was no reluctant decision, but a choice exercised voluntarily because the party was
(and remains) alert to Hindu concerns."

A somewhat academic point is whether it is indeed best to have one party as champion of a given
cause, rather than to stay aloof from all parties while pressurizing all of them and forcing them to
compete for your constituency's support. In this case, it seems to me that at least the Congress
Party would have been much more sympathetic to the Hindu position on Ayodhya, and much less
tied to the Communist-dominated anti-Hindu front, if the Ayodhya demand had not gotten so
identified with the BJP. The then Congress leader, Rajiv Gandhi (unlike the "secular
fundamentalists" who claim his legacy, like M.J. Akbar and Mani Shankar Aiyar), was a modern and
practical man, and he was definitely ready to allow the construction of the Ram Janmabhoomi
temple in return for some sop to the Muslim leadership, just to get it over with and move on to
more tangible issues. I don't know if the identification of the Ayodhya demand with the BJP could
have been avoided (through the RSS, the VHP and its Ayodhya campaign were already linked with
the BJP anyway), but serious strategists should analyze all the factors of success and failure
including the alternatives which we can discern with the benefit of hindsight.

Now the main point: the BJP was "alert to Hindu concerns" and hence not reluctant to embrace the
Ayodhya demand. To corroborate this, Kanchan Gupta quotes from two BJP statements made in
1989, which are in themselves quite unobjectionable (though they contain the term "Hindu
sentiments" too many times). He summarizes them as focussing on "cultural nationalism, or
Hindutva" and on the fact that "India may be more than Hinduism but it cannot be less". And to
top it all, L.K. Advani's excellent statement is quoted: "We represent the commitment that this is
our ancient nation, not a nation born in 1947, but a nation which has a hoary past and whose
culture is essentially Hindu." Yes, the BJP of 1989 was a great party. There is no doubt that its
activists wholeheartedly supported the Ayodhya demand, but it remains uncertain whether the
leadership's temporary enthusiasm sprang from something better than opportunism. Of course, the
leadership is a fairly large group with different tendencies with different degrees of commitment on
Ayodhya and other Hindu issues.

Kanchan Gupta maintains that the BJP is still committed to the construction of the temple. About
the demolition, it was "regrettable that the famed discipline of the Sangh Parivar failed to withstand
the furor of Hindu disquiet", but there was no regret over "the collapse of the domes". I have no
quarrel with that. I can also understand that the BJP has tried to re -widen its focus and profile after
the Ayodhya drama, and it is even possible that the issue will be solved in a just way without further
political interference. Indeed, after half a century of deliberations, and in spite of perennial political
pressures on the judges, the Allahabad High Court might still do justice to the Hindus. After all, the
Hindus have a cast-iron case, and the judges do seem sensitive to the historical and juridical facts of

the matter (as I was told by Dr. B.R. Grover and Dr. S.P. Gupta, whose expert testimonies on the
old revenue records and on the archaeological evidence have been heard by the said Court).

As a matter of principle, one should not make too much of the Ayodhya controversy. The Hindu
position is the right one and the issue is important as a symbol,— but not more than that. If the
party feels it can achieve more important things for Hindu society by keeping Ayodhya in the
background for a while, that could be the right decision. But what is the BJP's record in the post-
Demolition years?

Mr. Gupta moves on to the evaluation of the 13-day (14-day in his count) BJP Government, the
hottest fortnight of 1996. He argues that at least at the level of rhetoric, this was undeniably the
most nationalistic and the most unapologetically Hindu Government since 1947: announcing a ban
on cow- slaughter, the "liberal" Vajpayee declaring that India is secular not in spite of but because of
its Hindu majority, and... well, that's it, these two points. Gupta claims that this bold articulation of
cultural nationalism "made the opponents of this philosophy look silly", and that it was the very
opposite of "crawling in the dust", which was my description of the BJP leadership's typical attitude
vis-a-vis the secularists.

I am not aware of any occasion during that fortnight when the secularists looked silly to an
objective observer. They looked mean and wrong-headed, because that is what they are, but their
success in closing ranks againt the BJP Government and in dictating the terms of public discourse
including Vajpayee's speech (which extolled "secularism", very much their term) can hardly be
described as silly. The expression "looking silly" reminds me rather of that occasion a few years ago
when a member of the national BJP leadership proposed the "Mahatma Gandhi formula" for a
compromise on Ayodhya, compromise which amounted to a return of the Muslim-occupied Hindu
sites to the Hindus. The reference he made to a particular issue of one of Gandhi's weeklies had not
been verified, the said issue turned out not to exist (publication of the paper had been stopped years
before the date given), and Gandhi had never proposed such a formula. The BJP had made
Ayodhya its number one campaign issue, yet it had not bothered to verify a wild claim which any
secularist journalist could debunk at short notice. On a silver platter, the party handed its enemies
the chance to dispense with their usual lies and to speak the truth while exposing a Hindutva
leader's attempted deceit. Of course, their claim that this incident showed the unscrupled
Goebbelsian mentality of the BJP was self-serving hyperbole; what it did show instead was the silly
thoughdessness of the Hindutva leaders, innocents abroad in the real world of politics.

Kanchan Gupta then explains that the BJP Government had not really retreated from its
commitment to abrogate Article 370 concerning Kashmir: since it did not have the two-thirds
majority needed to amend the Constitution, it was simply unable to fulfil this promise, and
admitting this was but a matter of honesty and realism. Of course, I am aware that a BJP majority
Government would be unable to realize the distinctive points of its programme (except by
persuading others to join it on specific points), and it would already have been a great success if the
party had merely stayed in power, just to break the taboo on the very idea of a BJP Government.
But Panun Kashmir, the Kashmiri refugee organization, well-placed to evaluate the exact impact of
Vajpayee's statements on the Kashmir situation, thought it necessary to rebuke the BJP for its

"betrayal" of the cause of Kashmir's full integration in India. It announced that apparently no
political party except the Shiv Sena could be tmsted to uphold the rights of the Kashmiri Hindus. I
confess that my information on Vajpayee's plans for Kashmir was incomplete; but Gupta need not
bother about convincing an outsider like myself, I will automatically believe him when he has
convinced the Kashmiri refugees.

Gupta admits that "it remains a fact that the BJP cannot look forward to majority Muslim support",
that "it cannot but depend on the Hindu vote for electoral success", and that "to disown this fact
would amount to disowning the party's raison d'etre", but defends Advani's vote of thanks to the
Muslim voters, made during the party's national executive meeting in Goa. I had quoted the
grumbling of some BJP workers against Advani's thanking the Muslim voters but never the Hindu
voters as such, though he owes his political career to the latter. Gupta replies: "The very fact that
Mr. Advani 'thanked' Muslims for voting BJP — never mind that probably one in a thousand
Muslim voters stamped the party symbol on the ballot paper — was indicative of the paradigm shift
in Moslim opinion post December 6, 1992. The belligerence that marked the boycott of Republic
Day celebrations in 1988 had first given way to disbelief as the disputed structure came crashing
down and then to acceptance of majoritarian sentiments at the time of polls. That a Muslim
delegation called on the BJP-Shiv Sena Government and sought to work in tandem with the Hindu
right signifies a political victory unparalleled in India's post-Mughal history."

Really, I don't object to Advani thanking the Muslim voters, for his making this communal
distinction in the electorate merely reflects reality. If Muslims vote for the BJP rather than for anti-
national parties, it does amount to a substantial step in the right direction, away from Islamic
separatism. But to say that the visit of a Muslim lobby group to the BJP/SS government in Mumbai
is a "political victory unparalleled in India's post-Mughal history" is a wild exaggeration. I am sure
that the Muslim delegation to the BJP/SS government was quite explicit about its intention to
safeguard Muslim interests, not national let alone Hindu interests. Rather than being a spectacular
innovation, Muslim kowtows before the existing powers for the sake of safeguarding the Muslim
interests is an old tradition; it was tried out with roaring success by the Muslim League for 41 years
from the time of its foundation down to the time of Partition.

Gupta's reference to the apparent loss of belligerence among the Muslims since 1993, when the
post-Demolition riots died down, calls for an explanation. About the facts themselves there can be
no doubt, or in Asghar Ali Engineer's words: "Before the Babri demolition it was said a riot a day
takes place in India. But since 1993 this position has drastically changed. (...) Organising riots does
not seem to be a paying proposition at least for the present." [1] Gupta seems to be claiming the
credit on behalf of his party, but most Hindutva activists I know are united in giving the credit to
the Kar Sevaks: it was their simplistic and illiterate action which made clear to the Muslim riot-
mongers that there is a limit to Hindu patience.

Let us finally address the truly worrying part of Kanchan Gupta's article, about "this last thing of
recommending that the BJP should adopt a new two-point agenda of freeing Hindu temples from
Government control and amending Article 30 in order to allow Hindu institutions the same benefits
as those controlled by minorities". I am indeed in favour of a refocussing of the communal dispute

to points of legal and constitutional discrimination against the Hindus, such as the Minorities'
Commission and the special status of Kashmir, Mizoram and Nagaland. A top priority should be
the abolition of the discrimination sanctioned by Article 30, which allows "minorities" to set up and
administer their own educational institutions, in their own communal interest but with Government
subsidies.

Gupta duly notes that the BJP "has articulated its views on Article 30 in its Manifesto: 'Ensure
equality for all and discrimination against none on grounds of religion in matters of education by
amending Article 30.'" This could be done by adjusting the Hindu rights upwards or the minorities'
rights downwards. My impression so far was that the BJP had in mind the extension to the Hindus
of the privileges conceded to the minorities; that is at least what BJP experts like Justice Rama Jois
had told me. It is remarkable that the BJP Manifesto is ambiguous about this; this may well be due
to the influence of people like Kanchan Gupta. For indeed, and to my surprise, Mr. Gupta's
position is this: "The solution, from a particular perspective, lies in adopting a radical approach to
the problem, scrapping Article 30 in its entirety, not merely amending it to include in its scope
Hindu institutions, for the latter approach could only enlarge the realm of malpractices as are
evident in minority-managed institutions."

I had already noted in my own article that a downward equalization, stripping the minorities of their
privileges, would cause a revolt among the minorities with international support, a crisis which the
present BJP is incapable of handling. It seems that my warning has not impressed him; I must have
underestimated the BJP's metde. Well, I wish the BJP a whole lot of good luck if it wants to cut into
the Christian and Muslim positions; it will have to face the pandemonium of their muscle -money-
media power.

But the breath-taking surprise in Gupta's position lies elsewhere. Here is a BJP spokesman who
considers Hindus incapable of honestly administering their own colleges: if Hindus are given the
same rights as Muslims and Christians, this will only lead to more "malpractices". For similar
reasons, my own "suggestion that the BJP should campaign for the state's retreat from the
management of Hindu temples" is rejected as being "not an acceptable proposition". On the
contrary, "the BJP should be in the forefront of the demand for state intervention to facilitate social
and religious reform".

Follows a list of laws exclusively affecting the Hindus, which are described as beneficial, to the
extent that today, "Hindu women are far better off than Muslim or Christian women" and "Hindu
society [is] able to compete successfully in a modern world": Sati Regulation of 1829, Hindu Widow
Remarriage Act of 1856, Age of Consent Bill, Travancore Royal Declaration on all-caste temple
entry (in this list the only law imposed by a Hindu state), and the four Acts of Parliament of 1955-
56 constituting the Hindu Code. With reference to a court case in which Brahmins had
unsuccessfully challenged the appointment of an Ezhava as temple priest, Gupta notes: "Had there
not been a Travancore Devaswom Board, an Ezhava would never have made it to Priesthood and
the Travancore Royal Declaration of the 1930s on temple entry would have remained a forgotten
edict." Therefore, the BJP should continue the line taken by the Hindu Religious Endowments
Commission (1960, led by Sir C.P. Ramaswamy Aiyer), which opted for "the speedy enactment of

legislation for Government supervision of temples in States where there was no such law"; minor
improvements may be made on the model of the law governing the Vaishnodevi shrine in Jammu.

For Gupta, if anything, the BJP should work for the implementation of the second, never-
implemented recommendation of the same commission: to extend this form of state control to the
places of worship of the minorities. Once more, Kanchan Gupta wants to solve the existing
inequality by stripping the minorities of their privileges rather than by extending these to the Hindu
majority. I repeat my warning that this would probably cause a communal upheaval which a BJP
Government could not handle. [2] But the most remarkable point about Gupta's plea for more state
intervention in education and temple management is not its recklessness, but its stark disavowal of
everything the RSS Parivar stands for.

One of the beautiful things about the Sangh Parivar is its active belief in civil self-organization
rather than state intervention. The BJS opposed the Hindu Code Bill, not because it opposed
reform (as Swami Karpatri's Ram Rajya Parishad did), but because it rejected interference by a
secular state in internal Hindu affairs. The 1951 BJS Manifesto was unambiguous: "Hindu Code
Bill. The party holds that social reform should not come as imposition from above. It should work
from within the society. Any far-reaching changes as envisaged in the Hindu Code Bill, therefore,
should not be made unless there is a strong popular demand for them and a clear verdict is obtained
from the electorate." [3] And now Gupta tells us that Hindu society by itself is incapable of reform,
that the RSS project has failed, that it could never have succeeded anyway, and that only coercion
by the Nehruvian state could implement the reforms which the RSS pretends to work for. Maybe
Gupta is right, but in that case the Sangh Parivar ought to organize a large-scale internal debate
about the principles involved.

Finally, Gupta restates the BJP's general commitments: "The party cannot afford to lose its cutting
edge, its ideological commitment to uncompromising nationalism, be it cultural or economic —
Hindutva and Swadeshi have to remain the BJP's twin oars with the helmsman (at present Mr.
Advani) setting the course towards the re-emergence of India as a modern, re -invigorated nation
that can claim justifiable pride in its self-identity and self-reliance. This would mean a continuing
campaign on issues like Article 370, Ayodhya, uniform civil code, illegal immigration, social
harmony, national security, self-reliance, social reform and cultural re-awakening. (...) Above all, the
BJP must prepare for power so that it is able to ensure India's transition from suppressed
nationhood to a proud nation aware of its true identity with absolute ease; so that it is able to
deliver on its promise of 'good governance', which is not a 'colourless slogan', as Mr. Elst argues,
but as the party manifesto says, the sum total of 'the four concepts of Suraksha, Shuchita, Swadeshi
and Samrasata'."[4]

In most democratic countries, "good governance" would certainly be a colourless slogan, but Mr.
Gupta has a point: in India most parties do not dare to make this totally empty promise because
their actual record would make it sound laughable. It reflects well on the BJP that it still dares to
mention the very term "good governance", even though its record is not spotless either.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the BJP has eagerly adopted these innocuous secular slogans
because the label of "Hindu fundamentalists" etc. became too heavy to bear. While good

governance is certainly a commendable campaign promise, its eloquence lies not only in its own
contents but also in what it wants to deflect attention away from.

And that brings us to a final point in Kanchan Gupta's reply: "These are not issues that ensure good
'public relations', something which seems to figure high on Mr. Elst's list of priorities, but these are
issues which set apart the BJP from other political parties, giving it an identity which others secredy
aspire for but are scared to admit in public." Reference is to my own criticism of the BJP's awfully
poor public relations during its Ayodhya campaign. My point was and is precisely that, contrary to
Kanchan Gupta's bold claims, the BJP is not bravely insensitive to the abuse it receives from
opinion-makers including the secularist establishment and its parrots, the international media. On
the contrary, the BJP's political line is determined to a considerable extent by what its enemies say
about it. When it comes to those points which give the BJP its distinct identity in India's party
landscape, the BJP is not a proud and defiant champion of a radical alternative to the rotten
establishment, but a sycophantic beggar trying to curry favour with the same establishment. When
articulating its "cultural nationalism", the BJP systematically tries to define this as essentially the
same thing as the prevalent secularism minus a few excesses. Even when pretending to formulate an
alternative, the BJP is still paying implicit tribute to the Nehruvian system. Even when pretending to
undo some of the damage to Hindu temples wrought by Islam, the BJP whitewashes and praises
Islam. [5] That the BJP stoops to this "crawling in the dust before its enemies" (I stand by that
description, Mr. Gupta) is largely the effect of its fright before a bullying crowd of opinion -makers.
The BJP consists of very ordinary people (which is alright, certainly preferable to the spoilt children
who make up the secularist establishment) and they don't like being in the dock for decades on end.
It is for this reason, the BJP's demonstrable concern about public opinion, that the BJP in its turn
has no serious option but to influence public opinion in its own favour.

Public opinion consists of two sections. On the one hand you have the Marxist and "secular
fundamentalist" shepherd-dogs whose bullying rhetoric frightens many people into compliance with
their anti-Hindu line. On the other, you have the docile herd of fearful conformists and ignorant
outsiders. The weight which the former section carries largely depends on the extent to which the
latter follows its dictates. In this situation, any serious movement would work overtime to detach
the herd from the bullies, the camp-followers from the hard core, for this would substantially alter
the ideological power equation determining the political possibilities before the BJP. Call it "public
relations" or anything you want, but it is imperative that Hindu activists effectively counter the
disinformation which cuts them off from a part of their natural Hindu constituency and of their
natural allies in the outside world.

To sum up, I still think that a BJP Government at the centre may be a healthy development for
India, and I still believe that the RSS can be an important instrument for the self-renewal of Hindu
society. However, they need first of all to think of themselves as just that — instruments in the
service of Hindu civilization. They need to evaluate seriously what ends their policies have actually
been serving, and to improve their performance. The next word should come from them, and it
should not be just a defensive brief like Kanchan Gupta's newspaper article, but a comprehensive
evaluation of their achievements in terms of their goals.

[1] A. A. Engineer: "Communalism and Communal Violence, 1996", Economic and Political
Weekly, 15 Feb. 1997, p.323-326. Of course, Engineer forgets to note the murders of Hindutva
activists in his rather reassuring survey of communal violence in 1996.

[2] On the other hand, I am aware that history provides many examples of people who surprised
everyone with their unexpected courage and skill when provoked by a crisis. Quite possibly, some
individuals in a future BJP Government would do likewise and thereby shake the Hindutva
movement out of its slumber and confusion.

[3] BJS Party Documents 1951-1972, vol.l, p.57-58.

[4] Suraksha = security, Shuchita = impeccability, Swadeshi = economic self-reliance, Samrasata =
solidarity.

[5] E.g., in his post-Demolition speech in the Lok Sabha, A.B. Vajpayee declared that he did "not
recognize Aurangzeb as a representative of Islam", meaning that Islam is alright but extraneous
forces put Aurangzeb on an un-Islamic course of persecution and temple destruction. The RSS
publishing-house Suruchi Prakashan has published his speech in a booklet titled, with unintended
irony, Hindus Betrayed.